The Sunday Poem: 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 (1970-2023) was an award-winning poet, novelist and short story writer. His Collected Poems, introduced by Maura Dooley, is published by Salt on 30 March

Illustration by Chris Riddell