Hold Everything Dear

for John Berger


as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey


as the rose buds a green room to breathe


and blossoms like the wind


as the thinning birches whisper their silver stories of the wind to the


urgent in the trucks


as the leaves of the hedge store the light


that the moment thought it had lost


as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a wren in the turning air


as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky


and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark


hold everything dear


the calligraphy of birds across the morning


the million hands of the axe, the soft hand of the earth


one step ahead of time


the broken teeth of tribes and their long place


steppe-scattered and together


clay's small, surviving handle, the near ghost of a jug


carrying itself towards us through the soil


the pledge of offered arms, the single sheet that is our common walking


the map of the palm held


in a knot


but given as a torch


hold everything dear


the paths they make towards us and how far we open towards them


the justice of a grass that unravels palaces but shelters the songs of the searching


the vessel that names the waves, the jug of this life, as it fills with the days


as it sinks to become what it loves


memory that grows into a shape the tree always knew as a seed


the words


the bread


the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door


the yearning to begin again together


animals keen inside the parliament of the world


the people in the room the people in the street the people


hold everything dear


19th May 2005

Gareth Evans

Загрузка...