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when I open the parcel

and lift out each item
I press my face
into their textures
....smell sunshine, your small hands
long dark hair and sad eyes
in the silk and cotton.


I think of you;
carefully, how carefully folding
each piece of my former armour
in my last life,
to send to me in my new life,
which is so full with very separate
seasons and skylines,
and then the salt crusts
under lower lashes
-because now I have Europe, but no you.

I catch glimpses of you still
first thing in the morning, or late at night
-in shop windows walking home
when my guard is down.

Here there is no bleached sunlight
but still, small hands,
long dark hair and sad eyes
that live amid the folds of silk


and cotton.