They are great healers, English Springs.
You loved their delicate colourings -
sequential yellows, eggshell blues -
not pigments you preferred to use,
lady of pallors and foetal jars
and surgical interiors.
But wasn't it warmth you wanted most?

These Grantchester willows keep your ghost,
young and in love and half way through
the half-life that was left to you.
The Cam still crawls through patient grass,
preserving ephemerals in glass.
A bull thrush shouts from a willow thicket,
Catch it! Catch it! Catch it! Catch it!
Catch what? An owl in a petalled dress?
The gnarl at the root of a distress?

Dear Sylvia, we must close our book.
...