Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

A poem for this Easter:

My Father's Prayer Book, Page 44

Most life is ice-melt,
bells through sea-mist,
dark coming home and hurrying.
There are no exceptions.
Thoughtful men feeling
the stars' pull across half the world,
knowing coasts' thick rocks
vanish in the seas' wash finally--
these men too have urgent private business:
they deal in golden things and lures.

Faded writing in a prayer-book's margin--
this remedy for love affairs and projects:
"Stand under old trees in the wind".
Heaven is huge then and not temporary.

-- Ian McDonald, p. 45 in Between Silence and Silence.