VI Tristia

to whom it may concern

	
And next to you (my private ways with you)
I miss sweet England. Mine. The deferential
downward glance of soft South Bucks,
obdurately past-tense; its forelock-tugging beeches
caught in a mizzling Bovril scented gust
from Broom-Wade's saffron-tinted slag-dunes.

Above it all, on the vert crest or crown
of the railway cutting, the bodgers busy in their dens
hand-latheing chairlegs and cross-struts for Gomme's
and Glenister's Windsor chair (hard on the arse,
contoured for well-upholstered buttocks).

At the end of its tether, a goat up there
has grazed an almost perfect tonsure. O,
remember me sometimes, and my crumpled horn,
as I hunker down here amid malarial swamps,
turning my back on this squalid sea,
and well-nigh die with longing for what's past.