Listen to me. Proper poets only like to stroll
amid the kinds of plants whose names are rare:
acanthus, privet, box. But I love roads
which lead to grassy ditches where,
from half-dry puddles, boys scoop up
a few emaciated eels:
green lanes which run along the ditches’ edge
and drop between the tufts of giant reeds
down to the orchards, to the lemon trees.

It’s better that the blue should swallow up
and hush the chatter of the birds.
We hear more clearly then the whispering
of friendly branches in the scarcely moving air
and catch a scent we cannot disassociate
from earth: a restless sweetness raining on the heart.
The place performs a miracle of peace
on troubled and distracted minds;
poor we may be, but here we gain
our share of riches, and that is
the smell of lemons.

These are the silences, you see, in which
things give themselves away, seem ready
to betray their final secret.
We may be about to find a flaw of Nature.
We are at the dead point of the world,
the link that will not hold,
the disentangling thread that finally
will take us to the heart of something true.
The eyes search everywhere,
the brain requires an answer… then it yields, disintegrates:
effect of perfume overflowing most
when day most languishes.
These are the silences in which
we glimpse in every fleeting human ghost
a certain disarranged Divinity.

But the illusion fails. Time drags us back
to noisy cities where we see the blue
in patches only, up between the roofs.
The rain is wearying the earth. Now winter’s tedium
weighs on the houses, light turns miserly,
the spirit bitter.
                            Then, one day,
glimpsed through a half-shut gate,
there in the courtyard trees
the yellows of the lemons are on show.
The chill which gripped our hearts relents
as sunlight’s golden trumpets
pour their songs into our souls.