`But then it's the light / that makes you remember.'
Yehuda Amichai, Forgetting Someone.
I get up to pace the house late at night -
am an anxious adult shutting doors, winding the clock,
pulling out plugs, making the dripping tap stop:
but on the landing, I look out to check the light,
neighbours' roof-tops, my trees, the weather.
Wind tugs at the moon that is a memory
wide and yellow and I am a tide of worry
dragged back again to what I will never forget - my mother
kneeling beside me, her six year old child, mopping
my night-time sweats away with her sweet made-up tune.
Lady Moon, Lady Moon, she sings to the high dish of a moon -
nearly forty years on, I swear I can still hear her singing
and feel her arms tight around me, her finger
pointing down below to two foxes who have found their way
into our garden through the wood of time. Their eyes looking up, say
The moon is a light left on - its light there to make you remember.