On this beautiful spring day in February

With delphinium-blue skies and cheeky

Crocuses splashing purple and dazzling

Daffs nodding agreement in this mild April

Zephyr of a breeze - then do folk long to go on  pilgrimage 

Our pilgrimages tend to interiority

But we still seek relics of a past that cannot last.

I imagine that if a poet who I have in mind

Were given one more day on this  mortal sod

This would be the kind of mild, English day

That she would choose. The attempt to resurrect 

The past always leads to a dereliction of the

The present. That quantum moment

Of flux and uncertainty that lies within the hollowed

Out bridge in time that links the fleeting past and unknowable future:

Just so many days like this we are allotted,

Maybe a baker's dozen over a life-time

To truly notice such things as the flowers and trees and the Turner-skies

Of this benign and blessed old country of ours.

And lose ourselves, as Chaucer did so-long ago, 

Watching his pilgrims wend their weary ways to Canterbury.