Can I be the only one alive
Able to remember those times?
What keeps them from asking the others?
As I start on my dinner of dogfish and cockles
A draught blows the hinges and one of them shuffles
In on the floor to sound me about our troubles.
Though he’s nearly as old as myself the grey hags in the corner
Are beginning to watch his motions
As he loses his pencil and the page in his notebook.
I tell him about the day the mouse tumbled
In the one jar of oil and my mother shouting
At the Yank captain that all her geese were stolen.
I fix my eye on the mountain across the valley
Where we all came from and on the one cloud stalling
Clamped on the wild shelf, that will not move away.
Beyond the walls I can hear the children playing
In the riverbed. If I could tell what they are crying
It would lighten my darkness like knowing the language of birds.