Gwyneth Blue

I close my eyes and sing her name,

shape her ghost on the air.

The trees are begging for Spring.

One lane haunts another in Wales.

This hedge lets in a saline wind

though it’s been fifty years inland.

 

The river’s genie snags on a thorn

on its way to the sea, vague summers

where time behaves differently,

finds her curled up in a dune,

creaturely in her sleep, her breath

shaping a ghost from a ghost.

 

Gifting me a young man’s pain,

a brutal tide for a brittle shell,

she has vanished again, returned

to sand, the softness of dunes.

And so these drowned songs

surface in my ear, remember her.

 

An abstract sail brings her near,

the sea’s stretchmarks in the sand

of a tawny, ploughed acre,

or a steep scree’s skyline

where hawks surf bright clouds

on the bluest day of the year.

 

I close my eyes in a winter lane

and, shaping a ghost from a ghost,

sing her name.