Bewildered at all the things she  left unsaid
serendipity, chances cut dead:
wise enough to play the fool.
on a vicious January night
put out the light, and then put out the light
memory cuts through this taut cold
slices ugly, like a knife grown old and blunt.
I let the future unfold
in signs hidden by an iron fog,
a life lived in vain..
a black hole in time.
everything the same? 

Be-jewelled spider-webbed
frost-filled graveyard echo
yew trees shadow against the moon.
no trembling now from the scattered dead
eviscerated by all that was left unsaid
all that time can do to human hearts and lips and eyes
trapped in earth-infected graves
kissed by the tears of the foolish wise:
flayed by an ancient consciousness of what is.

I stand alone in this freezing unghosted ground,
my insides squirm like a snake,
as I try to make out the palimpsest of names and dates:
unspoken frost-whitened eyes.
free will or fate – always too early or always too late?

Turned away from hearth and home,
from the ends of empire,
we return down these unfriendly urban miles,
we who were born between Belsen and Napalm
try not to bully or bluster or fawn.
but choose to seize the beauty of the day
to hold it fast, then, give it clean away