An Elegy for Rupert Brooke

We lost you, just outside the Hellespont,
Aegean waves your only mourning veil,
Even until your fever found you frail
Within your holy cabin, or your want 
Of foreign fields, to give to us. Now come,
Ilium fell, and all the boys that died 
As victims of a careless, boastful pride 
Can sleep in peace; their Trojan war is done. 

In Skyros’ soil, we’ll find your richer dust,
Though all hopes for concealment burnt away
In the impersonal mythology. 
To us, you always shall in grief be lost,
But guiding, you will always be to me,
A wayward star adrift in foreign skies. 

Christmas Sonnet I

The lights are shining bronze outside tonight,
Swamping the fields in shades of yellow, green
Or dirty orange; bold, and yet serene,
And creeping in – exacting, cleansing white.
A blur of cars, in shades of winter blues
Incise their way through this despotic fog,
And from the furrows scamper hares, agog,
Enraptured, shaking, turning blue as bruises.

Now come; and leaking through the window pane,
The vibrant shades of autumn’s dying eves
To hailing eyes and open ardent smiles;
My bleeding bedroom greys beg to be stained
So through the shade I watch you slowly weave,
To settle in, colonies of light and guile.