The Way In

They’re still alight, those enchanted streetlamps
between Little Malvern and Great Malvern.

There are chains of them beneath British Camp
bobbing like scuts of gas at twilight.

Lamps peter up the hillside to the wells
and flicker half-visibly behind bare oaks

out-blazed by headlights of delivery trucks
shrieking through gears on drives of high hotels.

Those lamp-lanes are Christmas to my boys
at any dusk or in any season.

Winter days nod and the short light goes;
I read them stories as those low lamps glow.

Their dreams will line the lanes with Narnians.
The way in takes them running through the snow.