Poetry

Gravity
by Tobias Hill

How can there have been a time when this
still lay undiscovered: light falling
through the trees, and the first leaves falling
all at once into the cold evening,
leaves through light in endless gravity?
By the church where I sang as a boy
and dreamed I'd be a scientist
I break my walk, and sit quite still.

How still must I sit to hear the dead?
Through the obduracy of the yews
the wind shuffles and stills and runs on

into the fallen leaves by the locked church door,
with the sibilance of the Lord's Prayer.

Forgive us our trespasses.
Dusk falls into the streets.

The owl quarters its territories.
Still I am not still enough.


TOBIAS HILL