Sleeplessness. At dawn, soft rain, the birds,
and music – Pachelbel’s Canon played
over and over to soothe a mind still fazed
after a dizzy waking at one a.m. –
an alarm call to check on my mother.
With practised silence I opened her door,
in the quarter light leaned towards her face,
porcelain-pale, the strength of those fine bones,
to hear a breath. The same life-tide that swept us
apart has brought us to this grateful,
elegaic love, the hub we turn on –
Demeter and Kore becoming
each other, held in a graced affinity
between loss and loss. Twilight summer.