Sexy with grass, groggy with sex, and happy
I sit on the floor among cushions picking out a song:
‘Vietnam is a War. Two men have walked on the moon.’
He loves my playing, loves my singing, loves me.
Out there old birch trees blaze; we have a garden
of weeds and wildflowers; a gully of ginger and fennel.
This house, once white, grows out of green like a mushroom.
I want him again. He rolls on his back, playing dead.
He’s thirty-eight, my professor – ‘middle-aged’
I tell him. He says it’s true, and he’ll be middle-aged
still when I’m old. I tell him that will be never.
Cat-like I lick him, I croon in corners of his body
‘Vietnam is a war. Two men have walked on the moon.’
You can’t love more than this. The world will have to change.
Down the gully, he tells me, one day a motorway will come
and sweep us aside – old houses, derelict gardens,
our hair and beads and beards, our protest banners.
Only our songs will survive up there where today
tree-branches print themselves on a page so blue
it swims with my tears, it smiles because I’m singing
‘Vietnam is a War. Two men have walked on the moon.’