I wish that I could have been your guardian angel,
Watching from above,
Because that is where I felt safe,
Giving you my love.

But in this earthly form I faltered:
I could not see
how to build, with these small and hands,
The good life for you and me.

The journey to the stars is short,
And the blade of trust is sharp,
Cleaving permanently, here on earth,
The two of us apart.

If I were that angel,
Watching from above,
I would have found some way to tell you,
That as a creature upon this earth, you always had my love.

But I of earth stand, a child,
Straddling a Blakean whole,
Neither here nor there knowing
Exactly where to go.

But now broken, dismayed, renewed and delivered,
here to this moment to see
nothing but the quiet acknowlegding
that we should let things be.

Small Reprieve

Everyday I walk past the primary school on the corner near my street. The children play, unnoticed by me in the hurried, late dash to lectures. But today there was a family. Of three and a dog. The small boy, clutching his shirt across his tiny heart in his hand, a tear slowly falling from an unblinking eye, watching his sister walk without looking back into the playground. Her pink satchel falling into the mingles of other kids. The family waits. The small dog tucks at their heels. The tear falls in silent slowness. I stare at them. They at me. Clutching to my own heart, thinking this begins the lifelong charge of separations and losses for which grief offers only but small reprieve.