We carry what has gone before
tamped right down in the dark, the transplant
 

seamless into our DNA
like broken seaside towns hanging on to a name
 

struck through them in old sticks of candy striped
rock and our strata says - look – this terrible
 

wrenching happened, a howl I heard
from my mother, she from her mother, her mother’s,
 

mother - grey day reasons for no reasonable
sadness other than feeling the weight of days,
 

noted, piled up and gone down in the west,
here, we are golden, watching the sun disappear,
 

the day’s curfew and ours, we pay respects, rituals
we hold for us, for the dead; tears, yellow flowers,
 

clutching Ophelia’s rosemary-in-remembrance,
monochrome photos, bright spots of memory
 

and a lit candle to show the way,
                      the eventual way out of the shadow