At Milton's Imagined Grave

Hear the awkward wind in the long grass

Spin the tumblers of your vegetable lock

Near a rude stone, stuck in the sea-propped land.

Had I a lute, or Spenser's oaten reed,

Nine ladies sweetly would I call

From their careful corridors, wherein

England sleeps in your fondled bones.

I would tear the ocean at either crumbling shore

Till the splintered years were spat up like ships

Past the nibbling fish, and the rat-picked littoral.

Listen to the feathered flutes of necessity

Spinning madrigals through your stopped ears!

They are God's birds, and you are not dust

Though the dead hear nothing in their shovelled breast.

The waves break their tongues on the clipped rock,

Dying for song, and the mermaids shake their hair,

Churning the white waste, where the ships track.

Time has no meaning here: the days drop

Like golden apples toward the western shore

Where the nine muses guard your living choir.