Companions
The bread that’s broken when we eat together
Tastes sweet. A sunbeam stealing to your hand
Seems as if spilled from something brimming over
Within me, wanting no word, or itself
The word I wanted! Find we not our own
Language in winds, fresh from a golden place,
When breasting the high down at last we turn
To each other, bright with rapturous escape,
And the hills sing together, like our hearts,
Lost in the light! Between us, as we walk
Green roadsides, under homely hedgerow elms
Of summer leaf, silences are as water
Smooth for the sail and shining to the verge,
But intimate as a hand’s touch when we pace
Long crowded pavements amber—lamped in dusk
That holds its dark breath over the gay talk,
Bright eyes, and grief buried in moving sound.
There is a secret colour that has dyed
The world within our hearts: none knows it else,
No more than that which thickens the flushed light
Deep in the foxglove’s honey—throat; it is there
In the midst of light speech and forgetfulness,
In the empty house of absence, where the walls
Echo other voices; it is in the midst
Of the unsaid fears the mind plots forts against,
In the dragging thought and drizzle of blank care,
The daily doing of what must be done;
Then suddenly it glows and bathes us like the sun.
