...'all the rooks wheeling...'

THE ROOKS AT LEIXLIP

This haunting poem was discovered at Leixlip Castle in Ireland in October of 1977 by Edward James, the principal English collector of surrealist paintings, and a frequent visitor to Leixlip, in the blotter in the Chinese room. It was dedicated to Caroline Blackwood, a cousin of Mr. Guinness and the widow of the American poet Robert Lowell. (http://boards.ancestry.com/localities.britisles.ireland.kid.general/681/mb.ashx)

I would like to be not one rook
but all the rooks wheeling and counter wheeling
in the dusk, a people of black declamations
well over a thousand and forty
that do not stop to be counted
yet in their ballet through this aftermath
at the verge of autumn-perching sleep
never collide in the air at all at all at all.

The chill night warmed with feathers
and embroidered with cawing white stars
rotates until the dawn makes the great, copper,
shining, ancient beech-tree's golden city
shimmer again, while its gigantic cupola of leafage seems
a Byzantium of sempeternal hope
and the dew-young sun in a cloudless dome
of blue comes up - to the music of grass.