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image borrowed from bing

Home


The end of September.
All traces of our summer guests
have gone: sand rinsed from showers,
beach towels folded away.

Under the terrace
the deflated paddling pool
gathers leaves.

We will not be here
much longer: palm trees, the Mistral,
the smell of coconut oil
at the supermarket check-out,
things of the past.

Four years of our life.
We measure it in numbers:
additions, subtractions,
try and make sense
of what we gain, what we lose.

A language. The scent of bread
carried on a sea breeze. The company
of the sun. The people we love
far away at the end of a phone.

Let me imagine a year ahead:
my parents' will celebrate
their 60th year together.
The smell of apples in the cold store.
The cat will have captured
a foreign territory and accepted it
as home. Which is what

we all crave: home.


Lynn Rees

Posted over on her site Applehouse Poetry