But who will be our poet now?

August 2016

Who will be our poet now?

When you have watched me down the stairs for the last time.

When your kindness falls like a shadow across my heart for the last time.
Who will be our poet now?

Who will count the losses and the gains? The living and the dead?

We have agonised over the meaning of words, you and I. 

Pulled rabbits out of hats.

Drawn maps and put out fires.

Bought time from ghosts.

But who will be our poet now?

Will the joined up things, once frayed and burned, speak words instead of you?

Will the still place in the centre, which was once a storm, give up its dead for the life underneath?

I think the healing will whisper in caves,

and in the branches of trees.

It will chatter on street corners,

and fall silent where it should…

And you will do this again and again. 

A poet who makes verse from lost worlds, never knowing what became of us after that.

We are your cloud of witnesses

Out there living because of you.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart.