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Redemption Song
I can hardly speak but I try:
my brain falls silent, still
it is the dying of the light
when a ferment of tenses
leads me up many cold-cut cul de sacs.
I linger on a moonlight-figure
palely mirroring the sparkling frost,
she’s gone but never lost.
Suspicious of the silences within
outside is wild, the colour of blood
soaks into the sky.
A barge meanders down the river
on a bright mid-summer morn;
I hear peals of girlish laughter
echoing from both banks.
Passing under metal bridges ladies
quiver under their parasols, men in top hats,
like well-paid actors in a film about rivers,
over balance and fall into the dirty water
one after another as if this was a deliberate
act of mass suicide. Which it so obviously is.
Bodies splash into the sweet scent
of grass newly cut and only
forty-two years old and gloriously confused
she removes her shoes and happily remembers
that wildfires can’t be bought or sold.
