Public Republic

Roger Craik

Photo: Johan Larsson

Lust and all its urgent traffic gone
and unimaginable now, I watch
the daylight fading on the wall beyond
her roundish arm, and thinly start to dream.

I’m eighty headlamp-glaring miles from home
where, side by side, the two decanters stand
that used to be my grandparents’, now mine.
I’d like to pour myself a sherry now
from one of them, the one that holds the dry,
and feel the stopple’s imperfectly-fitting grind.

Bed was early in those days.
I never thought, as I do now,
embattled, “All I have to do,”
about the day to come. From time to time,
if wakeful I would hear my grandparents,
too old for love but loving still,
kiss, twice, outside my bedroom door.
They slept in different rooms because they snored.

But that was long ago,
and they are gone.
Beyond her arm the wall’s grown dark.

Poem from the volume of poetry “Those Years“