While

for Lucinda

While you were confined to the gloom
of our hushed and shuttered room,
I stepped out into the sun.
Olive-trees all the way down
to the hidden, then sudden valley,
where I hoped to see things more clearly:
each tree with unique, twisted glace
asserting rights in that harsh place,
huggings its shade to itself
while flaunting an enigmatic wealth
of drab, yet glittering foliage,
under which - and this was the knowledge
I'd come for - it formed its fruit
from a pressure like unspoken thought.

Christopher Reid in Selected Poems