Nobody noticed her, the poet, as she walked barefoot downthe street. Her clothes were in tattered, her hair unbrushed and unwashed. Shewas poor as a pauper, but she smiles like the whole world had just been givento her on a silver plate.

Spring was coming; for the first time in months, the sky wasa fragile turquoise veined with the delicate whiteness of clouds. She sat downin the grass. In summer, when she came here last, it was tall and golden andhid her from the world. Now it was low and scrub-like, but it was green as herlover’s eyes and it held within that greenness all the promise of the turningyear.

The lambs were calling and the birds were rich withevensong. All around her, the roads and houses were silent as the grave. Herfriends and neighbours, the people that called this place their home, were yetto hear the glory of the rites of Spring. The only sign that anyone had everlived here but her were the plastic bags that they had left wind-torn in thegrass, and the warm, winery smell of burning coal rising slowly from theirchimneys.

It was her blessing, the poet - her blessing and her curse;like it was the blessing and the curse of every poet that had come before her,whose hearts she held so close against her own. It was their place to be as theOld Gods are in an increasingly Christian world. It was they who walkedbarefoot upon the Earth, changing ever with her ever-changing seasons whiletheir peers all but washed those changes away from the world with the poisonsof air-conditioned central heating, with their roofs and rooms and silent,static air, until the cards above the mantel became the only sign that thingsever changed at all.

But there’s a certain symbiosis between the poet and theland tat the other people never even dreamed of: in Spring, they dreamed; inAutumn, they dreamed of dying; in Summer, they dozed lazily; and in Winter,they are already dead.

And she knew, the poet. She knew, and so did the Romanticsand the Renaissance playwrights and the witches. They all would look to themountains in Spring as she did, and see the ochres and sepias melting slowlyinto green. They saw the perfection of it all in every jackdaw, every floweringweed and every cold spring evening when the pale, golden-water light of the sunmade sundials out of fountain pens pressed avidly to paper, and the souls, thespirits of all who’d come before reached out amidst the twilight to brush thetears from one another with a perfect love, a perfect trust. Perfectlyconnected to everyone and everything around them, while the slow machine ofhumanity drudged ever onwards under its own illusions and inertia, cut by itsown hand, and in the lightless, seasonless, air-conditioned evening, neverrealising just how much it was losing . . . or just how much it had lost.