Peterstone

“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere”
Philip Larkin, I remember, I remember
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/73.html


On the Levels, the sky seems vast,
A vault of blue above the fields.
A slow procession of clouds, trailing skirts of rain,
Gives notice of the need for shelter,
If there were shelter to be found:
But the hedges are sparse ragged clumps,
The few trees gnarled and stunted by the wind.

On the pasture, horses stand immobile,
Heads downwind, tails blowing back and forth,
Incurious eyes looking out, unblinking;
Overhead, gulls fly in busy Vs.
Across the Channel, hills emerge,
A fleeting vision of another shore.
The gulls can leave; the horses stay behind:
Yet, they observe, the gulls always return.

On this approximation of the mathematician’s plane,
Zeno’s motion paradox stays the smallest step;
Free will is revealed as illusion:
All we choose is how we stand,
Not where. And if once the chain should fall
Allowing us to move to other, better, places,
Still the evening wind would blow,
Bringing the scent of far bazaars,
The prospect of distant hills mocking our ambition
For purely local victories



Martin Locock, 1998