The Life to Come
The next time I hope
my mother will live
decidedly longer – that she may see
my two children born; her son a grown man.
One red rose was all
Time gave me to give!
Amazing to think
how many I’ve had –
lives, that is (and deaths!), though loves, too, for sure;
how many indeed since the dawn of Time!
All’s been forgotten,
the good and the bad.
Hard to imagine
I could be given
a luckier life, a luckier break
from all those aeons of non-existence,
the hot fires of Hell,
cold rooms in Heaven.
How good it would be
to live it again,
my mother below in the scullery,
in the attic above my teenage self
dreaming teenage dreams,
listening to the rain.