"Mantova" The first thing I saw in the morning Was a huge golden bee ploughing His burly right shoulder into the belly Of a sleek yellow pear Low on… - Richard Wilbur

During my lunch hour, which I spent on a bench in a nearby park, the waitresses would come and sit beside me talking at random, laughing, joking, smoking cigarettes. I learned about their tawdry dreams, their simple hopes, their home lives, their fear of feeling anything deeply, their sex problems, their husbands. They were an eager, restless, talkative, ignorant bunch, but casually kind and impersonal for all that. They knew nothing of hate and fear, and strove instinctively to avoid all passion.

Well, I was ten and very much afraid. In my kind world the dead were out of range And I could not forgive the sad or strange In beast or man.

The beacon-blaze unsheathing turns The face of darkness pale And now with one grand chop gives clearance to Our human visions . . .