Poetry 21 August 2019 Four Seven (For W.R.F.M) A new poem by Grey Gowrie. Getty Sign UpGet the New Statesman\'s Morning Call email. Sign-up Snowmelt sogs the field; the farmer knows new growth is coming; with it better food or better money when he hits the rows in superstores with homegrown plenitude. All is so hopeful. If he won’t convert his barn for letting, swallows, swifts will come back from the Nile until the days grow short again with all their cheerful breeding done. Cheerful and lewd, which is the point of spring, and musical, which is the point of birds, though insufficient to ease the suffering of mortal man imprinted by plain words like time, decay and being never there always before some spring comes round again, who can’t escape to somersault in air, revel in sunlight with no thought of rain. Wisdom is bringing to the present tense lifelong commitment. Let each new tomorrow be like a lifetime, be a recompense knowing you’re a toad and there’s the harrow. Memories are seductive at this time of wheeling birds. Purple crocoi thrust through dingy bandages until the rhyme moves from mutability to lust. Even in my own midwinter I bask in the recollection of a spring sixty years gone when flowers grew as high and all the birds were just as deafening. Our brains people a landscape, an Old Master scene with Diana and her retinue all given proper names. Heart beats faster but in the end just one name speaks to you while others scurry off behind the frame, behind a tree just coming into leaf with life no longer treated as a game nor death portrayed as villain or as thief. The gift is given. Seize it. Seize the day, Torquatus, when things come around again. As for seasons, you have your part to play however brief your walk-on and the rain freshens the violets you picked for her to press between leaves of a little book you wrote with the same intention. For sure they’ll last longer than you but they bring luck. Marcel spied the beach from an attic room, pleasured himself for hours in messy prose. Like Charlus, who had briefly fancied him, girls on the beach turned into teenage boys. Old Flaccus cherishes his orchard and his cellar with its racks of amphorae. He writes in the morning and finds life grand until the dusk brings back mortality. What cheers him is the prospect of his fame. He’s ranked with Theseus and Aeneas now. Nodding acquaintance is not quite the same but who, among the dead, will ever know? He raids the wardrobe of mythology. We turn to physicists: the post-Einstein magic of unpredictability, quanta, the curvatures of space and time. Whether in Charon’s boat, shuttled through space deep frozen – fantasy of billionaires – the same old journey stares us in the face. Wine does its work. Get down the cellar stairs. Wine works its wonder. So do grace and vim. Wonder itself is paradise enow. Moments before his crab devoured him Steve Jobs sat up and murmured one word: Wow! Great man, great poet you’re among the shades also, with Hawking and Euripides. Heaven has banned celebrity parades. Tend to your garden, man, and take your ease. › John Dyson’s memoir A Judge’s Journey deftly combines humility, humanity and historical context This article appears in the 21 August 2019 issue of the New Statesman, The great university con