Gabriel Fielding
from In the Time of Greenbloom
| A&C Black | 1956
What can I say that was not sooner said
By poets flowering in the uncut dead?
What say or sin or verbally convey
A sunken footprint in the earth,
A tongue distorted by its birth?
This one's a rose: it throws a whiter shadow
Than the cloud, and no man knows or sees
The spectre when the eye's unclosed;
The spectre is the rose...