Canticle by John F. Deane

found in New Poems on the Underground

Sometimes when you walk down to the red gate
hearing the scrape-music of your shoes across the gravel,
a yellow moon will lift over the hill;
you swing the gate shut and lean on the topmost bar
as if something has been acomplished in the world;
a night wind mistles through the poplar leaves
and all the noise of the universe stills
to an oboe hum, the given note of a perfect
music; there is a vast sky wholly dedicated
to the stars and you know, with certainty,
that all the dead are out, up there, in one
holiday flotilla, and that they celebrate
the fact of a red gate and a yellow moon
that tunes their instruments with you to the symphony