They will be real clouds
Danny Boyle

A heathen ground
elaborated by time’s
fancy fingerwork –
follow the thread,

the line a lutanist
discovered he could use
to flatter, now cabled
and wound to a shattering.

Are electrical storm
and golden bow
and mysteriously moving
rock a kind of spiritual

opening, or democracy’s
shutters? It’s Easter.
Though the sun is unwilling
to rise, something earths.

---

John Greening received a Cholmondeley Award in 2008 and has won both the Bridport and TLS Prizes. He is a regular reviewer for the TLS. The most recent of more than a dozen collections are Hunts: Poems 1978-2009 (Greenwich Exchange), Knot (Worple) and To the War Poets (Carcanet). 2015 saw the publication by Boydell of his major classical music anthology, Accompanied Voices, and his OUP edition of Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War. Heath, a collaboration with Penelope Shuttle, appears in 2016 from Nine Arches Press. He is RLF Writing Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge.