Milk

She says she’s lactose intolerant

but I think she just misses her dad,

a milkman, who sat down on his armchair

two Boxing Days ago and never work up.

He’d been saying he needed a rest.

There are objects that devastate us.

An empty milk bottle on a doorstep

as sad as a gravestone. Her mother

was a meteorologist and it was years

until she could look up at the stars.