Trees

They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.

Some of them are taller than department stores,

yet they do not draw attention to themselves.

You will be fitting a heated towel rail one day

and see, through the louvre window,

a shoal of olive-green fish changing direction

in the air that swims above the little gardens.

Or you will wake at your aunt’s cottage,

your sleep broken by a coal train on the empty hill

as the oaks roar in the wind off the channel.

Your kindness to animals, your skill at the clarinet,

these are accidental things.

We lost this game a long way back.

Look at you. You’re reading poetry.

Outside the spring air is thick

with the seeds of their children.