Today

I sometimes lie in the darkness
Glad there is nothing I can see
To blot the pictures in my memory:
Sunlight in a fallen tree
Where I hung on the wilting branches;
Woodlarks circling in the sky
Or folding like a bell into the heather;
Blue light hardening to die

Out of which there hurry faces,
Lips, smiles, a sudden frown,
A body white in the bracken,
Raindrops where the leaves lay brown,
Water, pavements, water,
A fence where the starlings preen –
I compel them through my memory,
Never asking what else might have been.

And then I go down to the children
And watch them sleeping in their room.
Will today be quite forgotten?
I summon it out of the gloom
And wish it into their memories
For a day I shall never see ...

Is it me I want them to remember?
What am I remembering but me?