Ghost Story

Memory infects the trees.
God’s mortar stains and what was once
pleasantly green, Jerusalem
in patchwork fields, becomes a yard
of ghosts hidden behind each oak
or thistle, rock or chalk.

Haunted England bows to you and yours,
created as it is by human eyes and hands.
The world is our design, and if the cries
of owls fetch forth an impression
of life pulled in to outer time,
those phantoms may as well be.

Fear and need make of our deaths a crime,
so shades are seen from land to naked lee.