things move around

Dad said simply reading about the world
was no substitute for seeing it. So I furled

my sleeping bag with a book of poems in it,
locked myself in my room, and a minute

later it was 1300 years ago,
and I was walking in the springtime with Li Po

to watch the young Yangtze broaden
with melting snow. I saw Spain with Lorca, and with Auden,

smelt blood in the dust of Madrid,
held my breath as hope and history fled.

I kept my head as Anne Boleyn died
with Wyatt looking on by my side,

I sat with Kipling in the suffocating Raj,
passed by Plath at Berck-Plage,

and hymned London with sundry Eliots and Blakes.
On trips to the Lakes

I read Frost at Midnight, and at midnight, Frost,
and I’ve lost count of the days I lost

in Armagh or New England with Muldoon,
his fat, pale, face a full moon,

like something out of Edward Lear,
impossibly far away. But with me, here,

and as certain as the sun, splintering the grey
of the night, igniting another day.