Illusion written on the body

Nature, climate change –
Those great, delicate things.
Much like the depths
Of the unsaid between
The woman who is a lover
And the female who is a mother.
The haunting tones of both.
The anxiety in the symphony
Of both. Her mother a bride
At twenty-five. Albums
Full of photographs.
People (some long dead and buried)
Captured on camera that still used film.
She taught her daughters
That although the potential,
The fabric of truth was there.
That love, married life, and
The sexual transaction
Won’t always triumph in the ways
That illness in the world would.
Ted Hughes’s winter pollen
Has descended upon the chilled earth.
For every blushing bride
There is a flushed groom.
Nobody speaks about
The difficulties of married life.
When does love torment?
When does love become winter?
Angels. The children sprout
Wings of rain as they run through
The sprinkler. Innocents.
What the adults who live
Vicariously through them
Would not give to experience
Childhood once again.
Memory, memory, where art thou memory?
Stems tearing themselves away
From the root, making their
Way towards the sunlight.
It is the most natural feeling
In the world for any woman
To want to have a child.
On her infertility, she is mute.
It never comes up in interviews.
The fact that she is also
Not married. Also not in love.
So all people tap dance their way
Through life and childhood.

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