Competition: Sunday morning

In Competition No. 2667 you were invited to supply a reflection, in verse, on Sunday morning.

In Competition No. 2667 you were invited to supply a reflection, in verse, on Sunday morning. You split into two camps: some infused with the bleak spirit of Billie Holiday’s ‘Gloomy
Sunday’ (‘Gloomy is Sunday with shadows I spend it all, / My heart and I have decided to end it all’); others full of the joys of lie-ins, an ocean of colour supplements, bacon
and eggs, and Sunday worship.
It was Wallace Stevens’s meditation that inspired this challenge, and Basil Ransome-Davies’s response to it earns him the bonus fiver. His fellow winners get £25.

I read it first in trancelike puzzlement.
Each word was clear, emphatic, but the sum —
the linkages, the upshot, the intent —
resisted, struck my comprehension dumb.

One element was solid: mastery,
the lyric conjoined to the technical,
the supple, plastic specificity,
the haunting logic, terse, subliminal.

Years later, at a lovely woman’s wake
(‘She died with her tan on’ her self-epitaph),
thinking what Stevens’ tropes or statements make of death, I found the drunken strength to
laugh –

and thanked America, the home of hope.