To think it would happen just at the dawn of winter –
querulous rooks startled from bald woods

like banknotes from a fire. We are back in our bodies
if not back in our clothes, even dead children

reborn in the prime of lives they’d never had,
us old-timers struck again by sex’s ambush,

the gravedigger’s shed a boudoir, but so too every
headstone, obelisk, and grass-grown path,

a moss-gowned Virgin tactfully lifting her gaze
over the sandstone wall towards Bradshaw’s Brae –

while hundreds of us are making love here, all
in the blink of a trumpet, a single note from an eye.