THE " A THOUSAND SMALL DELIBERATIONS"

Those with stubborn, routine-measured words
can protract the profit of a chilled age,
but they will fade, as rumours fade
being constantly replaced in webs and waves of wires,
what will never pass are these instead,
birdsong and cries of gulls that now last
all through the night, lamplight spurring
their persistence, theirs are the background breaths
and the sediments in our hearts,
and they can become the foreground
if breath makes the heart grow
while the body goes.
The blackbird pierces, crying its blade,
the air’s light glass, the gulls
slash in waves. At dawn when I fade
and maybe surface in another tide
I will first wait for their cries
to deliberate my new premises.

This poem appeared a few years ago in a section of "Poetry Scotland" on line, it shows the ineluctable echoes that Eliot's poetry maintains for me, lines from his poetry started reverberating in my mind at first in Italian in the late sixties before I could read and decently speak in English.