Memorial

The stone is ready. In memory of
our beloved daughter - we accepted
the mason’s English lesson, to omit
‘loving’ before ‘memory’, or else
‘beloved’ before ‘daughter’.The last
of many declarations of this love.
Enough. These are all the words
the stone will say.

I have crossed the waste land, almost all the way.
I have stumbled over dead boughs utterly dry of sap, and heard
voices from roofless cottages. There was a beautiful
cold city, with black churches and gold palaces.

By luck perhaps, though not by courage, I have come through.
I have come to a coppice she never saw, not even from a distance.

Somewhere in the centre of her wilderness, she suddenly fell.

Perhaps she looked something in the eye
that I had closed my eyes to, or heard
in a moonless night a word more terrible
than any that came to me on the wind.

Sad spring, all green and red and yellow, the saddest I can remember.

Hostas shrivel in autumn, turn sick-yellow then shit-brown, their leaves
slimy and stuck to the soil, but come spring their undead fingers push
through, pointing and reaching. The stone is ready:

the black stone with the word beloved
will be set upright before winter. A few
red roses will guzzle their last water and cut-
flower food, and begin to rot. This stone

will stand through many winters. Weathered,
it will not fall when her name has lost its meaning,
and passers-by are strangers, carrying other flowers.