Missing
You were not the rowan tree,
silhouetted on your practice net
at the far end of the garden.
We children did not occupy
a nesting place in forking boughs,
experiment with harmonies,
and we did not learn to fly
under pinnate symmetries
of feathered leaves.
We did not explore
the rowan’s mythic properties,
quickbeam amulets
which could not protect you,
bleeding scarlet rowan berries,
when you left us.
You were not here to see it fall,
its sprawl of limbs across the grass,
half waving and half crushed,
and were not dazed by empty
air, the shape of sky
as it unselved.
You could no longer lop or stack,
book a skip or fill the boot,
compress the rowan’s fifty feet
into a composted giving back,
or build behind the iron shed
what I will not call a pyre.
Fiona Larkin‘s work has appeared in SOUTH Poetry and online in The Stare’s Nest. She teaches English in the voluntary sector.