In Green Heaven

This prospect that between my eyelids seeps
Grabs at my dry thoughts, seizes my heartbeat,
Enters that place where my soul is waiting
Pulls me, like a hare through a noose in the woods,
From knotted undergrowth to baize of grass
Into its green heaven. And this is where
I want to stay, today, tomorrow and
Forever in the dream of another world.
Not this world (no, not this one) but in that
Heaven on earth that exists, if at all,
Only in our mind, but in every mind,
Different in each but in each the same
In that it’s ours alone and everyone’s
For us only and for all of us, and
Without which this world in which we must live
Would be what it is, all that it could be:
Cinders in the mouth of a burning corpse.
Live again in my eyes, in this prospect
Before me, in this air that I inhale
Until I can breathe no more, in this earth
That blackens my nails as I crawl towards you,
Rabbit-foot lucky, out of the world’s snare,
Ascending this hill between sea and sky
Into the heaven to which we all return:
Blood to rivers and bone to limestone
And our cold flesh to the land that made us
And life to the memory of the living
The green heather growing out of our graves.