A weight is lifted as we look at each other

You, in your brilliant femininity, me, helplessly hoping:

Love has sustained me my whole life

The loss of that, even for a moment,

Leaves me bereft upon a far-shore

The door into the rose garden closed

And I saw what was really always there:

Denying the frosty richness of happiness to myself,

Removing the comfortable unhappiness of the everyday,.

Such randomness acclimatised to mood made me stern or rude,

Suited to the faraway genetics of my orphan father and my settled

Mother, deeply-embedded patterns of influence that I cannot abide or evade,

The fight against an unwanted inheritance:

Blessed by woman, cursed by sea and moon.