The gorse looks winter dead. On the hillside jagged bushes.
My friend is searching their carcases. They never stop flowering, 

there is always a flower in winter. The bushes denied this,

rank on rank of ragged prickles. Gorse is favoured by fairies
you insist. Look! High up one yellow bud like a tiny buoy

on a murky sea marking the flowering. Through wires

and antennae a thread of sap. The bush keeps one bud alight 
like a shrug of the exhausted mother or the eyelids

of Gordon Hodgeon blinking his poetry to nurses.
The gorse looks winter dead. Inside his head the poems hid.

They never stopped flowering. The bush keeps alight one bud.

We were walking in our lockdown, the year of remote living like
a blight of aloneness. Allusions rise up to greet me, vanish

as quickly as the fairies. I welcome the brambles, thickets

and thistles clasping my coat, the jagged gorse no one could
push through, evidence of resistance, impervious, flowering.