Poem: Stephen Spender, in remembrance

 Let prayers and bells ring out

loudly proclaiming grief

for the vanished, vanished dreams

of a vanished generation-

of poets who embraced their vocation

with virginal passion;

They were never old;

Great edifices fell

in their times, enraptured

in their song, encaptured

in arcs of blood, shuffling

their broken, dusty wings, 

to new flights, new things, 

poised

like the vapourous ethers

tremulously on the brink of transmutation;

Young gods, 

who worked their magic within,

blazing their words like galaxies

across the threshold of time-

words of water,

falling like the rain

rising with the mists,

hovering like hawks,

fierce-eyed and beautiful, beautiful immortal birds;

They have all gone, now, 

This, the last hawk

stooping 

like a stream to the hillock,

erased by lightning,

cleansed by thunder,

silenced lyre

delivering words to the wind,

forever rattling 

the windowpanes of our being

into new visions of hope;

Somewhere, on a field of gold, 

this fluttering banner is unfurled. 

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from Burnt Offerings, 1996