24 June 2016
Downstairs at 5.15 a.m.
with Radio 4’s flat voices, bleak
with disbelief, delivering the news.
Hunting for a quotation—not
things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,
although that’s close, and not the worst
are full of passionate intensity (though that’s true
too)
but for Yeats’ words,
exact, for Paudeen’s pence, and how
he caught all the small-mindedness, back then.
And now today: staring into
a garden looking like yesterday,
silver with dew, waiting and open,
and knowing nothing here’s the same.
D.A. Prince
If you have any thoughts
about this poem, D.A.
Prince would like to hear them
