Catching My Parents at It

Seven years old, I wake from a nightmare

and creep toward Mum and Dad’s door,

where a kind of sound emanates, loud,

the kind I have never heard before.

I pause; it sounds somewhere between 

pure pain and its opposite, ecstasy,

what a strange thing! What could it mean?

I open the door suddenly, and see

bright naked flesh, glowing, moving, more 

of that sound, now a metre from my face.

My own mother and father – the image

hazy now, and embarrassed, recoils,

though for sure they were happy, how I envy 

their married bliss, now forty and single.