stranger

What a work memory is – fecund,

abeyant, arcane!  How apparently

dormant, inconsequential images

awaken, seemingly unbidden!

 

I am fifteen, climbing the steep steps,

two at a time, from the Underground

to the street –  on a sunlit, London

October morning. I look up. Beginning

to descend, carefully, from the gentle light,

is a young woman,  heavily pregnant.

 

She has become a persistent stranger,

replete with promise – unrealised,

as yet and forever.