Status Updates From The Poems of Laura Riding: ...

We are now about to die the death of endeavour.
We have lain down on the old weary-bed
and composed our limbs and faces
to a picture once we saw we fancy
in a church or schoolroom(but it hangs
unpainted on the wall of heaven,
we shall never look like that,
Heaven went as we got up that first time,
mistrusting the young sleep of not being)
of an angel copied out of sleep
by a shaded hand, scribling the dawn