Once I Had A Secret Love

Nan died the same day that my book came
And although she could no longer understand
I read it to her anyway
Because that morning she had sat up in her bed
And unable to recognise my face
Sang every word of Secret Love by Doris Day
And whilst I found myself lost on my own page
She sang from the quarry of a dream
Where the silence of her eyes asked you to love her one last time
She sang through sanity’s restless camouflage
Into the distance between me and her
Into the void where the poetry might come
And she sang like a telltale heart with a mouth full of stars
Spilling its darkness
She sang with the integrity of birds
On the prow, her figurehead ship coursing through my blood
Through the shaking barley of eighty-six summers
And thirty-two thousand days
She sang from another time
She sang of my Grandad
She sang like prayer moving at the pace of exodus
She sang in our hearts
Throbbing like the constellations as we stood over her

She sings there still
She always will.