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On an East Wind from the Wars
The wind came in for several thousand miles all night and changed the close lie of your hair this morning. It has brought well-travelled sea-birds who forget their passage, singing. Old songs from the old battle- and burial-grounds seem new in new lands. They have to do with spring as new in seeming as the old air idling in your hair in fact. So new, so ignorant of any weather not your own, you like it, breathing in a wind that swept the battlefields of their worst smells, and took the dead unburied to the potter's field of air. For miles they sweetened on the sea-spray, the foul washed off, and what is left is spring to you, love, sweet, the salt blown past your shoulder luckily. No wonder your laugh rings like a chisel as it cuts your children's new names in the tombstone of thin air.