The city of three spires….
After the funerals
This poem is taken from ‘Rough Spun to Close Weave’. I’ve been asked if I’d include the printed poem with the podcast.
After the Funerals
one by one they take their leave; parting
without formal courtesies
startled by the shock, again, as
one by one they take their leave.
Affection, understanding, even knowing
what there was to value, come too late:
gifts delivered past their use by dates.
2
The plane strains upwards in the night, banks, and there,
below the city that we thought we knew;
drab streets, a park, its monuments, some houses
where the welcome meant we didn’t want to leave,
revealed as glowing labyrinth: vast, intricate and beautiful.
Too late we realise, again, how much there was to learn
before the detail disappears, becomes a pool of light
shrinking to a faint glow in the skies
behind us as we head towards another dawn.
3
So one by one they leave
stories that I didn’t understand and now forget,
lives whittled back to facts and dates
no one contests or verifies.
Box brownie photos in an old shoebox?
Left trying, once again, to reconstruct a map
I never stopped to memorise.