Light Years

What trace of you is left on this blue earth?
You went from us in fire,
your carbon food for roses
long since plucked and thrown away.

I kept safe pictures, objects
and revered them, in the hope
they might retain some distillate of you.
In time I came to realise,
that what they hold is part of me.

What’s left, it seems, is space.
The gaps within this life,
this time, these places
that somehow keep the shape of you.

And space itself must hold you still:
on clear nights I scan the sky
and wish myself upon some distant world
where I might yet receive a dot of light
that found its way from you.

first published in What the Peacock Replied