How is it possible that this beautiful poem was nowhere to be found online? Let's change that. (Potential update: "pressing button A" would now be scrolling and clicking.)

THE INVADING SPRING - Phoebe Hesketh

Man has fenced the wilderness back in the hills;
Tamed in the town he walks on concrete blocks;
And in the park his heart with pleasure fills -
But not at Wordsworth’s school-book daffodils.
No, his delight is catching up with clocks
And turning knobs and pressing button A -
The train is due; there’s half a minute to go
But the lift’s gone down and the escalator’s slow -
Praise God for the Underground this lark-song day!

Breathing, yet dead, his life is caged with steel -
Wire, wheel, and cable - automatic aids
To living - he exists but cannot feel
The slow barbaric beauty that invades
A world at Spring. He moves in crowds and queues
And reads the Morning Star and the Evening News
But cannot read the sky though April beats
A golden fanfare down the dusty streets
And breathes a green breath through the petrol fumes.


Yet a third-floor room is powerless to deny
The feel of leaves, the pollen-smell behind
New flowered cretonnes where a rebel wind
Is strong and blue with ranging through the sky.
And though the files of his mind are entered up
Like office ledgers, unknowing he holds the cup
Brimmed with the light of moons beyond his reach.
The street is thronged with more than he can know -
The Invisibles who know him; without speech
They call him; without form they come and go
And catch him by the sleeve until the slow
Unwilling flesh is beckoned from its task.
Released, he finds the vital stream that spills
A primrose light on sullen window-sills.