A yearning to be

— just forty-two years old and gloriously confused —

Photo by Claudio Büttler on Unsplash

I can hardly speak but I will try,
my brain falls silent, still;
it is the dying of the light
when a ferment of tenses
leads me up many cul de sacs.
Lingering, a moonlight-figure,
mirrors sadness, the sparkling frost,
she’s gone but never lost.
Suspicious of the silence offered
outside, all is wild, sky, the colour of blood,
time soaks up all I left, once, years ago,
on a barge meandering down the river
on a bright mid-summer morn
I hear peals of girlish laughter
echo, intermittently,from the banks.
Passing under metal bridges, ladies
quiver their parasols, men in top hats,
like well-paid actors in a film about rivers,
lose their balance and fall into the water,
one after another, as if this was a deliberate
act of mass suicide. Which it is.
Bodies splash into the sweet scent
of grass newly cut and just
forty-two years old and gloriously confused
she removes her shoes and happily remembers
that wildfires can’t be bought or sold
and so, her yearning to be in me, is born again.