Beacon Hill

Today, I have found you

in the small spaces, the pauses

of thought, the stops.

You are in the differences:

shades of green on Swithland stone,

broken and irregular,

tracks in the fields at Cropston,

the smoke from burning leaves

clinging, low, to the grass

like chiffon.

The strings subtly rising

in that National song

here in the car park

and the slim fingers of branches

clustering, upturned, supplicant

from coppiced trees

conjure you.

I stop here again, see

the sky with its rushing clouds

and two birds held on the pearl-lit air,

tiny and alive, forever

in motion around each other.