On Mill Road the nearest to nature you get
is where most people are dead.
The 40s was when they finished here;
no machine has carved up this ground.
Roots have boiled the earth instead.
Robins peering from granite thrones
soften summer for a rough sleeper.
A mining bee seeks home
and, blocked by the sleeping bag,
it pesters the man until he snaps.
These people knew better what lives in soil
and know it still.
What dies as bitter
as we will?
Victorian terraces and their orbiting swifts
cradle the burial place as yearly, it bakes.
A 21st century question: how to dig a pond
in a cemetery? How to call rain to gather
under a yew? How to excavate a portal
for muntjacs and squirrels
from railwaymen and laundresses
who never knew them?
Who will?