We are not dovetailed but opened to each other
So that our edges blur, and to and fro
A little wind-borne trade plies, filtering over,
Bartering our atoms when fair breezes blow.
Though, not like waters met and inter-running,
Our peoples dwell each under different sky,
Here at high, unsurveyed, dissolving frontiers
We cannot prove: ‘This is you, this is I.’
Oh now in you, no more in myself only
And God, I partly live, and seem to have died,
So given up, entered and entering wholly
(To cross the threshold is to be inside),
And wonder if at last, each through each far dispersed,
We shall die easily who loved this dying first.
– E.J. Scovell (1907-99)