Remember This: the Poet Laureate's tribute

In the swirl of its pool The home-coming salmon has no intuition of anything changed, just that the silver cord of its current is clear water running, the lid of its sky light soaking through light, without any shadows of faces or lines to splinter its path, and pull out of true the course of its mind.

Think of the flower-lit coffin set in vaulted public space, in state, so we who never knew you, but all half-suspect we knew you, wait, and delve inside our heads, and find the harsh insistence in our mind which says we're honouring a time that simply as a fact of time could only end, as also must our own lives turn from dust to dust.

In the grip of their season the sky-scraping trees continue their business of plumping up buds without an idea of what it might mean so long as leaves shoot in the polishing breeze, so long as leaves fall, so long as the burden of sunlight and dark rolls round its O without changing its plan or resting its weight.

Think of the standard and its blaze the tightened focus of our gaze, as now the coffin glides away through London's traffic-parted day and we, who estimate our loss in ways particular to us, can start to understand that here we see our future coming clear - our selves the same yet also changed and questioning, and re-arranged.

On the crest of their Downs with galloping sunlight the horses in training know in their bones nothing but racing, so all they can manage today is the beauty of sprinting and spurting mud-moons behind them, the draggle of mufti wind-burning to silk, the unbuttoned gasp of pleasure and longing at what might be won.

Think of the buried body laid inside its final earthly shade, in darkness like a solid cloud where weight and nothing coincide, in silence which will never break unless real angels really speak, while we who wait our turn live on re-calculating what has gone - time-tested dignity and pride and finished work personified.

In the eyes of our minds when the country and cities turn back to themselves this history stays: the four generations which linked with your life re-winding their span to childhood again, and seeing you stand at the edge of their days, where if they so wished you helped give a shape to slipstreaming time with a wave of your hand.