From The Years (Arc Publications, £8)
I came to tend – I lie – to visit the grave of a friend
and found an ugly shrub with waxy leaves
had made the plot its home. Since my last attendance
ten years had passed – doing I can’t think what,
except translate a dead man’s words – and now
the whole granite headstone was obscured
by brambles and weeds and this excrescence.
All overgrown. My friend had somehow ended up
in a thicket of Cyrillic, the White Russian sector
who have cared a lot better for their lost ones.
Or so you’d think if love were judged like that.
Now that I’m older than he ever was,
in far worse nick than he would have been,
I dimly sense how we’re the wrong way round.
Him under, me standing on the ground.
I snapped some branches from the shrub
half-expecting a hurt, indignant voice
to bubble up – bobok! bobok! – from the ragged
limbs – a reproach for the failure of
our friendship, the careless words, the disregard,
after the heaven-haven of the early years.
Now at least his name can be read, though not
the words we had the mason carve below,
the untranslated last line of Paradiso.
