Wych Elms Poem by Barry Van Asten

Beneath the stones, shallow hearts press
The hours into their starry margins,
And the irregular tide of time turns
The years that are passing away.

The shadows in the swept gardens shake and cease,
Winding a heart in as it repeats.
And beyond the boughs, those remembered things,
Where childhood's ghost is interposing

It's secret world: bones of Roman loneliness
Root with slow life and remain;
Signposts in the green hush, where magnolia's
Lose their language and waste away

In dumb reserve... storm's electric menace,
Winding along the lanes again,
Under the cross-hum of pylons
As the steel-ribbed sun is setting.

Wrists of ancestors make a wilderness
Under the pale beam where we wander,
And in the dark woods something dreadful sleeps,
As love careers into view and slips away.