Right on schedule, one century behind
The little bird on William Wordsworth’s cuckoo clock
Emerged from Time Itself, a home, to cuckoo.
Even at midnight

You could clearly hear noon. And yet not even
In sunny Grasmere did any light come free,
Each homely chunk of coal was a commodity
Time Itself paid for;

Sufficient unto the night were the miners below.
Together underground William and Dorothy go —
They who paid a Light Tax on their ninth window.
No place like home, though.

The benches fly backwards, the newspaper readers,
As if they’d always been left behind so far
And what they were reading no one remembers,
Wheezing old men pulled