Little Overture

David Barber

A shimmering in the scrub brush
Beside the tracks, a pleasing silken weft
Of stray raiment amid the rubbish.

Grace is like this: a scrim
Materializing in a strip of stubbly weeds.
It comes, it goes, a glint, a form

Of counterpoint and seduction.
Or call it a sampler, the handiwork
Of spring's first spiders practicing deception.

Now come closer. If it's silver lining
You want, it seems you have been hoodwinked.
Knots of kids have strewn

The slick innards of unspooled cassettes
Over the brambles as they wended
Home from school along the tracks.

Whose loss is it? Grace is like this.
Railway perennials shine in the wind.
Threads recur; pop songs persist

In telling us what we wish were true.
Trains storm by on time but still you wander,
Nodding to a beat you cannot hear.