Your mother walks light as an empty creel
Unlearning the intimate nudge and pull

Your trussed-up weight of seed-flesh and bone-curd
Had insisted on. That evicted world

Contracts round its history, its scar
Doomsday struck when your collapsed sphere

Extinguished itself in our atmosphere
Your mother heavy with the lightness in her

For six months you stayed cartographer
Charting my friend from husband towards father

He guessed a globe behind your steady mound
Then the pole fell, shooting star, into the ground

On lonely journеys I think of it all
Birth of death, exhumation for burial

A wreath of small clothеs, a memorial pram
Parents groping for a phantom limb

I drive by remote control on this bare road
Under a drizzling sky, a circling rook
Past mountain fields, full to the brim with cloud
White waves riding home on a wintry lough