‘Passing’

You take your first steps

Butterfly feet knee deep in snow

Pink nosed and fascinated

By the twinkling of Christmas. 

Little steps chasing bitter gems

Melting on your tongue. 

There’s something about snow

That demands spinning, dizzying

And constant. I think you might be sick

And yet you keep on spinning,

Laughing for good measure.

Cold knees barely covered by grating gingham 

That mum promised you’d grow into.

You nod through life lessons less on life and more on giving up

Until you are set free.

The playground’s so much smaller

Than the world out there

I promise

I’ll take you to see it one day – 

A newborn lamb is far more interesting

On the plains of California. 

You’ve graduated to a blazer,

Although it still doesn’t fit. Fretting something fierce

And sweating through the weeks

Before freedom. 

Soon you’ll be drunk on sunlight and fireside stories

And cheap cider. 

That grin you wear, the one that says

‘I’m on top of the world’

Makes my heart ache. 

For the world will keep on spinning

Until you are at the bottom. 

The cold has come again. 

Though masks and sweets and wellies

And the crack-bang-wallop of a thousand skyward colours

Punctuate your pain.

I want to take you hand in mine

But you leave

A trail of broken hearts in his wake

And yours.

And so the world keeps spinning. 

The snow, it melts

The sun, it sets

The heat, it chills,

The leaves, they die.

We die too, and so the sky

Grows darker

Until it’s light again.

The world will keep on spinning.