Returning for a Minor Operation

(for my brother, Greg)

I haven’t been to the Holy Land but expect I would feel that way:
the sense that at the site of the Garden or the wall of the old city,
among the continual passage of feet, of breathing, talking people
I was stepping on ground where He had stepped on his way to me.

I had it in Old Delhi: the dust in the streets, the Mughal bricks:
everywhere we breathe in yesterdays and tomorrows,
so many of them, turning over, ploughing under, returning
in a street-seller’s bad-teethed smile, the kites winging over.

What I can’t accept but have to sidestep, blur over
is that I am in the same place today as where we’d left you,
the ward where you stumbled in your hazed comprehension,
with the last of your bullock strength made a hobbled rush

for an exit, like a beast in the slaughter yard,
while we steered you, you who’d held us,
we, who’d followed in your footsteps around the garden,
led you back to a bed and a couple more months.