plovers

Long after there is no point feeling loss
I cross this now familiar dry plateau
and stop, hearing my footsteps also stop.
Silence, a fresh sheet falling on a bed,
settles. Not quite a silence after all:
a quiet breathing in the winter hedge
and sheep, cropping. Birds – a flock of something,
plovers, peewit, I don’t know, but breathing,
alive, quiet. There is nothing to fear,
only the din that echoes in my head.
Wet fading footprints vanish on the lane
as if I walked already here today
and my own self is not too far ahead.
I think, walk slow. Don’t catch her up again.