All that glitters ...

Not her brush
not her comb
with their trace
of ash-blonde hair.
Not the vase
she’d fill with roses
from her garden
standing empty
on my window-sill.
Not the picture she drew –
off work with the flu
or the wonky clay-pot
she made in pottery
at evening school.
Not her note
telling me,
‘Au revoir’, that
she’d loved me because
not in spite of. Nor
the lump in my throat –
the tin in my cupboard
I keep digestive biscuits in
with its faded,
hand-written sticker,
‘June, 1985 – ‘Home-made
gingerbread, baked
in Rachel’s kitchen’.
Not the yellowed cutting
from the local rag –
a photo of her
as Festival Queen.
Or the cross
she always wore –
twenty two carat
I bought her
for her twenty-first.
The metro-ticket
from a snatched
weekend in Paris,
marking the pages
in a book
she never finished.
That’s what I call
pure gold.