Convalescent, by the Kennet side, I see two raucous geese glide down to a synchronised landing through scattered waterfowl. Cygnet nests built under wharves, the pendant willows in a row

hold tints for the late spring’s promises of leaves in branches’ blurs, a greenish yellow. A Fire and Rescue launch goes by and, look, that Ukioe print has a swan stood on the current absorbed in waves of its headlong flow.

Feeling fragile, a memory of health, it’s my old self’s rehearsed in piecemeal efforts at improvement, finding unreal expectations

blight even what we do. Stripped beds, the ring-fenced saplings of a vanished factory’s park derive sense from resistless drift, an incorrigible makeshift valuing and devaluing things now the body politic has to get its health back too.