Meeting the first time for many years,
What do they expect to see
Of the beings they made once, for better and worse,
Of each other – he and she?
A shrine to lost love? a hovel for guilt?
A vacant historic pile?
Something in ruins? something rebuilt
In a grand or a makeshift style?
Whatever is here to be freshly scanned,
Their view will be overcast:
Though they’ll encounter, smile, shake hands,
They can only meet in the past –
Meet at the point where they parted, in
The house of what once they were,
Haunted by ghosts of what they might have been
Today, had they lived on there.
The life they had fashioned long ago
Seemed close as a honeycomb;
And if anything couples these strangers now
Who were each other’s home,
It is grief that the pureness and plenitude of
Their love’s long-flowering day
Could, like baser, flimsier stuff,
Corrupt or melt away.
Nothing left of the cells they stored
With joy, trust, charity
For years? … Nature, it seems, can afford
Such wastefulness: not we.