True Beauty

                   True Beauty

I watched true beauty as the bus rode past

The landscape Oxfordshire rolled out.  The nose

Sat nobler than the slopes that will outlast

Him, but its shape turned hillsides into prose.

Those poems, though they now were only thought

In paragraphs, competed using trees

Against dark, stout, aristocratic, taut

Nostrils.  Skin’s richest brown spoke like decrees

Against so so-ness of this England, sheep

And munching horses.  Lashes, black on eyes,

Were thick like Merlin’s forests and gave steep

Forebodings.  Loveliness was their surprise.

..His thick cut hair made heartbeats leap in flight.

….I never knew true beauty till this sight.