Poetry: Mark Tredinnick
All Our Days
For Sarah-Jo
The year is stuck in traffic near its close,
And the day has all of elsewhere in her eyes.
Though familiar voices from the back seat
Cry out for me to turn, now there is no UTurn I would ever make. And every billboard broadCasts the same news: we have become, my love,
All of a sudden, each other’s lives, and the morning
Stands and opens her hands and raises her brows
And smiles down all the beatitudes and bad
Attitudes she can fashion out of joy on us. And
If the morning does not say what took you both
So long? it’s only because she’s polite and out of breath:
For the better part of forever she’s been keeping us
A secret in fields and streams and riverbeds and lovers’
Mouths and clubs and pubs and villages. Instead, day says:
Take each other like the way you’d meant to go. She says:
Figtree, like a kindergarten of shadows; she says
Flame tree, like an overplayed hand; pelicans
Like Cadillacs, and an egret like a woman
Way too good for me, dancing the drainage ditch
Back into the swamp; morning says, November,
Like Saturn on sabbatical, bright as the inner
Life of darkness, blue as the intrigue
You wake in my eyes, my love, taking it nice
And easy all the way along the very
Edge of all of our days to come.
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