Theirs and Ours

The evening came to me like a dark dove.
Unannounced it cooled me.
Noting its soft wings
I walked less strangely on.
   A thought that sings
came softly to me: that below, above,
and through all surfaces, a freedom clings,
patterned of theirs and ours: for I saw love
and time in streets and stones and things.

I was walking in a road in Islington, north London, when this poem came to me. As a handful of my other poems it seems always to carry its place with it. It may have been a turning-point of sorts.