Revesby poem again

This is nearer what I wanted to achieve.

The Mirror of Love

‘Even locals are hazy about mid-Lincolnshire’
was all he meant to say,
but somehow lit upon
‘nobody knows where Revesby is’,

so I had to bite back
‘where I once bought an ostrich egg’,
‘where Aelred wrote Mirror of Love',
‘where Joseph Banks kept his kangaroo’.

Where the Wolds abruptly become the Fens
as if the fold in the map between north and south was visible
just where the world agrees west divides from east;
at the cross hairs of England.

Where there are bumps in the ground above
where Aelred first tested out an Abbot’s role
and might just have written his great work on love
and reflected all he wrote about.

Where, a short way off, near the ostrich farm,
a country house assumed the Abbey’s name
with the first garden planted with antipodean trees and shrubs
which Banks, with Captain Cook, brought home.

Where, equally far from our two homes,
two of us were allowed to unlock the church
to pray for our friend before he died
and look into a glass darkly distorted.

The view is from our bedroom window last week. The land falls away to the Golf Course but the owners of a strip behind the bungalows wants to build four story apartments here and thus help secure the viability of the hotel next door.