Walsingham

                                   WALSINGHAM

                                    Renaissance England hardly missed her.

                                    Cromwell broke the great stone wheels,

                                    Trod their glass to coloured grit

                                    And gave her lands to the fallow deer.

                                    An early sun through clear windows

                                    Lit the beds of their married bishops.

                                    The winter of the King's Bible

                                    Was spiced with Galilean spring.

                                    England forgot the tall girl

                                    In summer blue whose fingers made

                                    Bright wheels in the knot gardens.

                                    Queen of Heaven, she filled the dark

                                    Hawthorn lanes that smell of death

                                    With circling stars and the crescent moon.

                                    And when I came to this shrine of lights

                                    In witchy Norfolk I was unhappy

                                    Kneeling to what my Protestant conscience

                                    Told was a pagan image-

                                    Isis or Proserpina.

                                    But my true self was heart-sick

                                    Of preachment without empathy,

                                    Held back from self-forgetting prayer

                                    By fear of the Sistine Chapel god,

                                    And I loved her, as I still do,

                                    Mistress, mother, my wise sister,

                                    Walsingham Mary whose garden is

                                    That fearsome wheel of coloured fires.