I’ve loafed around for fifty years,
waiting for a call from God.
It never came. It hasn’t come
and faith has been amputated,

but did I ever have that limb?
and do I walk on crutches now?
and yet there have been many friends
have borne witness to apparitions
(I never thought them false) and there’s the ghost
of the Grandstand seen by many,
the phantom Bentley from Telegraph Hill,
thought to have caused accidents
along near Leatherhead Golf Club

and God has called many to do His will
and miracles happen, monotonously, frequently,
and I have seen all the faces of the night
and fancied God within a rose, a spider’s web,
a sunset or a long-remembered moment.

But now I wave my crutch in the air,
accusingly at the skies,
and can say nothing; no, not for all these words.
Forgive me, friends: fatigue rules my hand.

Heed me not, for it won’t be long before
you too catch this ague and give up the ghost.
Read much more of this and you will see
the spectre of a poor man's hope
dwindling to nothing in the vacant heavens.

Words! They pull us down, don’t they, like quicksand.