Without you
I won’t believe in ghosts but
the day after they told me you
had died, I saw you everywhere
we had been. Not there
in that dark garden shed with me
as I built a gate, that startlingly
first bright day of early summer
but in India, that ochre evening
we cycled the temple’s ruins, thumbing
our bells and laughing
and in the tumbling flats and bars we drank
and danced our thirties through. Moving
images of dazzling colour, screening all I
ever knew of you in the rushing cinema
of memory.
How can you be gone
when so much of the world
contained you?
The dark shed.
The bright garden.
The gate unhung.
The world
somehow still
here and there
without you.
Paul Fenn’s poem’s have been longlisted twice in the UK National poetry competition and once in the The Plough poetry prize and he has most recently had poems published in IS&T, Allegro, Dreich Magazine, The Frogmore papers, One Hand clapping, Obsessed with pipework and Dodging the rain.