7.

They married looking out to sea, the west

Storm, cloud, horizon: the church is now

A trust, the Celtic names of Cornwall buried

In the yard. Your mother’s people left

This green for another, but the place

They abandoned — there was no going back —

Was not as it is. The land remains but not

The leases, the hunger and diseases I imagine.

There is a history to love, facts that slip

Between the sheets, material to build a day,

A life, that poets forget. We see the lovely

Cliffs at Morwenstow without the motives

That took them out to sea. These lovers were

Phoenicians wandering with and without tin.