The Spectator

There’s a magical muddle          that clings to the page like mist to a meadow. No help in the hurting,          no truth in the light, just haze on the harvest. I’ve cancelled my comeback          and chosen instead to be cloistered in clover. In the blare of the body          the spirit lies mute like a book in a bottle. I’ll hunker in hollows          where wisdom is vague and history can’t happen. There’s a heaven of honey          in hives of friends’ hearts.

Last night among his fellow roughs, He plotted, schemed, and swore; An anxious statesman of the Bluffs, Who never looked before. To-day, beneath the foeman’s frown, He stands in Charles’s place, Ambassador from Britain’s crown, And type of all her race. Rich, reckless, posh, well-born, well-taught, Bewildered and alone, A heart with leftish instinct fraught, He yet can call his own. Ay, tear his body limb from limb, Bring cord or axe or flame, He only knows that straight through him Shall England come to shame.

When I was young, nobody ran, unless, behind them on a dark and lonely road, they felt the breath of some misshapen thing, the aspens quivered and the willows wept; or if they’d spent their bus fare on warm beer, and they were overdue where duty called. Accoutred armies hurtle through our parks and boulevards, no good to ask them where’s the fire. Health oozes from their every pore. The race is to the swift, though only three ascend the podium. The rest are also-rans, way down the field, not troubling the judge. But now my ears are pricked, I pick up speed. There is the flag, and there the finish line.

You go here and go there, but also stand still, return to the same spots: the bench on the hill in Victoria Park, above the plane trees that veil through winter branches the city’s spill, platform seven, same-time Tuesdays, Temple Meads gloomy and Cardiff central gleeful in sun, a table in the café waits, routinely where you sit, before work, as you’ve always done. You are running too, when you can, through early dark, sun lifting lazily over Ashton Court’s tree-lined hill, cross-country reps. Wednesdays, in Manor Woods Park, this New Year’s world breathes cautious, centred, still, those night walks home; Orion, seems the spindle, that turns time through January’s long chill.