In Mind of Philip Larkin

I dreamt last night in the winter dark

Of houses beckoning, lamps at their windows,

As if asleep one starts it all again, arriving 

 

To be welcomed among strangers,

A fools paradise of birth as we slept. 

Then the waking, early, pre-dawn, a grainy whiteness

 

One knows well–the obituary light of custom,

The hazy sadness of slippers,

And in the yard, the black, bare limbs of a lowland birch…