That senile mirror on the wall,
that seldom seems to reflect at all,
thinks it is a window or a lens,
a telescope that scans the hills.
When my children are playing near,
it hinges open like a door,
there are sweeties deep in there
and toys at play upon the floor.
And yet I like its hopeless ways
and leave it hanging on the wall,
it was great-aunt's mirror after all,
I still recall her large bright eye,
her smile that reached from ear to ear
she filled my life with love and cheer,
till they found her hanging on the wall.

Lay my corpse, lax and lilied, beneath a willow,
so its roots can lap and suck at me
and draw me up its stem like spring
pouring green onto the pooling brilliance of the grass.
Or fix that I be fed to swans, or maybe geese,
and flying far from winter’s deathy chill,
upon the gusting muscles of the air,
alight at last in deepest Africa:
the strange-familiar origin of things,
where bright among the pawpaws, figs and lemons,
wings are neither grey nor white
but many coloured, like the child of rain and sunlight,
and where the conversations of the laughing dead
sway like all the weeping willows of the world.