Lying in the bath with the door ajar

I hear her voice clear in the next room settling,

chatting away, sounding out fragments of song,

and, as so often now, I think of you.

Was it like this for you with us? Smiling

off-stage: from infant to adolescent,

soft cooing to lofty pronouncements?

What did you think when you were lying there

absorbing that sudden sentence that floored

us all. ‘I won’t see his family’, you replied.

What if I’d sat beside you, vague hopes shared,

names we might’ve chosen you could repeat,

and I’d say how I’d love them like you loved us.

But those first choices would just be empty hints

and would it matter if you saw a future

false, like I search for this dream of a past?

Is there comfort in the touching distance

of your loss at the first steps of one year,

her arrival at the end of the next almost

beside each other like your name within hers,  

and our last years striving somehow to connect?

We could have cherished, entrusted in the link

beyond the given bond of shared blue eyes.

Now a father, I see and feel more like you

than I ever knew; all you did, in the days,

and nights, the unseen love – the faith to live

knowing you won’t see the full story with

those you begin it by. It’s in gestures

we are remembered. How you were with us.

The life given; each gift time brings. The songs

you sang to me – the same songs that she now sings.

You equipped us with pens and paper, not just            

to keep us busy on long journeys, but to share

your own delight spotting nature. Birds. Rabbits. Deer.

The other hidden lives that surround us.

Yet years later, crossing the high border plains

battling the last rage of a week’s winter’s gales,     

our swaying car passing overturned trucks,

we trailed blinking-wet brake lights, seeing nothing.

But on reaching you the wind dropped. Becalmed.

Numbness befitting those first days, sleepwalking

the long, dulled-glass corridors overlooking

the distant estuary, to your blinds-shut room.

No horizon. And within days you were gone.

We quietly retreated South. Routines resumed.

Passers-by in their own lives didn’t know

or care. Held hostage to our senses.

Curtains drawn. Missed calls. Cocooned reactions.

Divisions. Darkness. Darkness. All was loss.

It seemed an age. But out there, light’s gradual reach

thawed the ground to a misty breath. First, snowdrops

nudging through. Birds, skittish, hungry, unseen.

It must have happened because now, here we are:

the sky, a bright and brittle smarting blue.

The air a claw grip achingly unfolding.

But still too sweet, too soon; embattled, winter-braced.

What’s it all for, if not seen by you?

Days must be lived in. What else can we do?

First spring, then remaining seasons must come.

Remembering you anew with each altered one.

The first lambs are born. Let us count them for you.