In which she learns the lost children are never found,
only remembered.

It starts, it always starts, with her
watching them and everything else blurring around them

as they burst through the water’s skin (again and again)
the years running off their limbs

the water washing them
back to what they were when she could still balance the weight

of each of them in turn on her left hip. That’s how it starts.
The next move is when she tries to blink the sight of them

on to the back of her mind’s eye so she can pull them out like a photo
from a drawer

but her eyes water and cloud –
so she tries something else:

to throw words around them like towels,
to pause the great gush of life of them into an aria

she can sing (again and again)

but the sun is so hot and anyway they’re doing something else now.
It’s nearly over when she gives up, she forgets

everything and her eyes clear.

But then the swallows come clipping and dipping the pool with their wings and beaks.

Try again say the swallows  
but what do they know of time?



Waiting for my life to begin

I saw them skim the fence of your teeth
...