Wake

The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen
but that I will learn to expect
and there’s a fracas-induced full moon,
clouds beneath like soot
from giant candles.
I woke up and the time ahead was missing
like Notre Dame’s gothic power
and the spots gone from a baby giraffe
born in a zoo in Tennessee.
Today I walked into a gelato-coloured
building and talked about search
engine optimisation, unfamiliar syntax
and the fact that Marcel Proust
wrote a 601-word-long run-on
sentence in In Search of Lost Time
and now I am squeezing the moon like
a stress ball in my fingers as stars fly.
There’s a person-shaped hole
in the centre of me where you ran through,
strings of words like a wake behind you.

Jane Frank is a prize-winning Australian poet, editor and academic. Her most recent collection is Gardening on Mars (Shearsman Books, 2025) and two earlier collections were published by Calanthe Press. Read more of her work at https://www.facebook.com/JaneFrankPoet/