You'll Never Know
by Simon Miller
The window confesses a square of summer,
A blue to stripe those bone-white cups,
The farmhouse jug you still remember
Sometimes. The netted curtains tremble
On the shadows of a breeze that, somewhere,
Absent leaves have smothered from the air.
Opaque, your gentle body spent by days,
You rest your brown and knotted fingers
On sheets turned down and tucked in ways
Your unchanged self would quietly adjust.
That was always your method, your routine;
The smoothing, placid ghost, the half- unseen.
Now in open space a child yells in sharp delight,
A throttled bike roars, spiking into the distance.
And in that moment your mind has taken flight
Skimming the dark waters of time—
To the bicycle leant against a whitewashed wall
The muffled ring of laughter from the village hall
Frost-brindled churns, blistered fields of clotted mud
Days imagined before dawn, the flare of his cigarette,
Stocking lines, that one-meek-kiss, flush of blood,
‘You’ll Never Know’ on the vicarage gramophone,
A rhapsody, those days.
When all began to fade,
Still you wept when you heard that love song played.
For you now, no letters lie in no special place.
Too brief the touch of love. Only an imagined
Ending; beneath the Perspex his dying face
Looks up, captures a blue square of summer
Skimming the dark waters, fading from sight
Falling towards home, forever losing height.
Simon Miller teaches English and Drama at an international school in Thailand where he lives with his wife and three growing children. He has written several plays for young people. His own childhood was spent between Botswana and England and he has rarely stopped exploring since. Social history, culture and the natural world are his key fascinations, particularly the points where all three meet.