Have a care, we sometimes say, spare a thought,
digging deep into the trough of coins
standing like an ancient tomb in frosted winter grass,
water acting as a body, half-lucid, bearing ice over depth
as they once imagined Atlas holding up the spinning globe,

and we can fish a single token, brittle, cold and quite
conceptual, and tender it, oh have a care, and feel the flesh quiver
like a bell at its root, or a coin fallen clatter
to the ground under sky and in the wind
to be giving, here, and sparing, in another place, it is an old

practice, a ritual half-imagined, now have a heart we call it,
right, to chivvy up some feeling and to wrench the mind manually
as if it were a cart, because the numbers and the numbness grow,
remember, how they took decision-making, took it off to make it
cleaner, and a prodigy of summer, full bounty, and the children,

they would know themselves deeper, full millennia later,
but we needed first to give ourselves over
to the graph and now I hear it, can you hear it,
in the grass frost is ticking, birds are chiming
bell        coin      bell      coin

Judith Bishop