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From a London garden cover

From a London garden

Chapter 3: THE EARTH-BOND
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About This Book

A collected series of lyrical poems moves between urban and rural imagery to reflect on love, mortality, time, memory, and moral growth. The poet uses concise, imagistic language and varied meters to meditate on human experience: longing and loss, pride and humility, the rhythms of city life and quiet country scenes, the passage of days and seasons, death and consolation. Voices range from personal confession to philosophical observation, with elegiac tones, religious reflection, and celebration of steadfastness. Recurring motifs—light and shadow, dawn and evening, gardens and streets—bind individual pieces into a contemplative portrait of inner life amid modern surroundings.

THE EARTH-BOND

Surely both earth and heaven are God’s; and so
He will not count it sin if I should love
More than the unknown heaven above
His dear earth that I know.
Meadow and sea and sky, and storm and shine,
Glad voices that from croft and coppice call,
The city loud with life, and all
Of mortal and divine
That make this earth akin to you and me,
Partner in hopes we live by or regret—
Dear are they all, and dearer yet
Some human two or three.
So that, as one in sleep may leave his bed
And, blindly drawn to haunts he loved by day,
Walk through an old familiar way
With sure, unconscious tread,
In the last sleep, if I should dream and do
Even as thus some living sleeper might,
I shall stray, ghost-like, in the night
Home to the earth I knew.