Sara Orange Tip Was Here

'Please, make me beautiful,' she said,
one soft-shuttered morning, from a cushion
on a chair by my bed.

How could I not, I mused? The light
from an ice-cream sundae dawn
shining right through her;

easier, by far, to straighten a rainbow,
to bring peace to the Gaza Strip,
to convince bees they don’t like honey...

Not make her lovely? I wouldn’t
even if I could. She whose name, alone,
is poetry...

as, with one stutter of her wings,
she is gone, through an open window,
‘high flying...adored’

and all that remains – a scrap
of crumpled paper in my pocket, says,
‘Sara Orange-Tip was here’.

There are certain things, certain meanings –
lost forever, when explained away
with words.