You with your oak bark hands

planted on the bank

just before the hill drop

to what is now town.

 

I could see worlds

still turning in your memory,

as if the clock stopped

in a hundred different places.

 

I even recognise a few

of the people caught here

in this last place of green

before the concrete and brick.

 

It is a cruelty to take you

from this bank above town.

It is crueller still to take all this

away.

My mother thinks I should try to write some less heavy poems, and I have been trying, but they all seem to twist into the shadows.