Cafe Grey, Greystones, 2019
Why are you always disappearing, John?
That’s what you said, Sylvia, and it was true:
though merely for a furtive smoke, yet gone
from your presence, and quite out of the blue.
I don’t like it, you rebuked me, as if somehow
you knew that people really can disappear,
not just from sight or from the here and now,
but from your life, never to reappear.
You are six years old, Sylvia, too young, I trust,
to know that life will be a matter of toing and froing,
with nothing ever certain – though try we must
to pretend there’s a point to our coming and going.
Anyway, here we are, a lifetime apart, you and I,
and I won’t get to see how yours turns out,
though I sense in your spirit a hankering to fly
free of your cages and see what it’s all about.
