Homage to Gilbert White

You did not leave a portrait like the rest of the enlighted family -- a mere charcoal sketch, a cloud of man or woman. Your grandfather's name weathered, blank almost, as the rebel trumpeter's obelisk which survives and sentinels your church. As they made another vicar, you hunched your bachelorhood in the concentration on a field's wicker alcove. Watch them swoop down The Hanger along the long field grace the ha-ha; above sprigs of oak they regain their altitudo. By then it was you, hauling with a sky family, pressing your notes out the trumpet of the great Hampshire wind.