The Town Is Still Asleep
The town is still asleep.
The sky is pale with quickening light.
Quenched, the long night of stars
Swirls under the earth, but one,
That silver planet, Venus, holds
Over the ice-haired lawns
A vernal promise: that love is not lost.
Walk through the streets
With birds and the clatter-clack
Of streetlights as they change,
A little tremble as the chill of night
Dies in a sunburst from the trees,
A vacant house whose owner dies,
A fallen elm, an abscess in the line
Of shops, a broken pane. I hold
My book which is all I may carry away,
