Len Webster's 'English Man, Foreign Wife' Poem by Len Webster

To look at long forgotten slides
And photographs I once sought to preserve
Is now a fresh experience for me,
Everything having been coloured by your presence,
By the revisiting of the same places
With you as a stranger, seeing all as new.

Clouds and the sun peeping through
But Stonehenge in the rain,
Trains steaming in the Severn Valley beside green fiels
And the river flowing past the cathedral at Worcester;
Cambridge and the visitors' book at King's,
The hill to the cathedral at Lincoln,
The distance between us on pebbled Shingle Street beach
When a friend said that if you stayed in England
You would fade away like a flower gripped by ice -
They're all changed because memory yields,
Surrenders history to the most recent,
No matter how I try to peel away the layers.

Embracing you, I rewrote my history
While you held the pen and smiled.