You Are No More

You are no more
in the hellebores –
not in their weeping,
wilted heads, no more
than you are in the photo
you would have taken of them.

Not in the peach-pink sorbet dawn
nor the frown-brown corduroy hills
that, before you were ill, we two
would have climbed.

You are no more
the lover of all things I love,
whom I recall scrubbing down
in our kitchen sink... so grubby,
and yet so tiny you hadn’t learnt to crawl;
then teaching you to swim. Noticing how blue
your lips got when you were cold.

Listening to you play
All Creatures Great
and Small – hearing
you stumble – same
part of the stave
every time...

You, who are no more,
no less, than a memory now;
not one that fades – one grows stronger
every day, of the one I hugged dry with a towel...
cupped their face in my hands
sitting on the sand
by a rock-pool...

The rush of the tide coming in...
a tern and her young; the shriek of a mother’s
last, frantic call.