These days we might recall
how even in a garden we ignored –
its grass clumps tangled
across cracked earth patches –
something was at work to bring
flecks of distant wilderness in
and how, waking in our new state,
with no more to go on than those
who were having to reinvent theirs
in a different kind of aftermath
(the adjustments reported hourly
on the battery wireless by the sink)
we’d be attuning ourselves to birdsong
from washing lines and TV aerials
and that view of a city emerging
from its own divisions which sat
like scenery behind untended borders
where plants we couldn’t name came into bloom.
