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Sue Butler

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This may have been...

... how I was conceived.
The result of a sailor's hurried loving,
breath in clouds and callused hands,

smoke leaking from the iron stove
as he twists, dreams
and then does not, steals blankets

to leave me so exposed,
that I have no more expectations.
His shouting is a past which echoes

into the coldness of the room,
with its bare floor
and its white door

open onto a landing,
where the damp air,
that tomorrow will be frost,

is collecting in the gap
between the glass
and the rotting wooden frame.

Outside, in the sullen river
beneath the ice,
there are Carp so old

that his calling out is a night sound
that no longer disturbs them.
Only I am disturbed.

The I who knows nothing
of barracks or revolution
of Kronstadt and Potyomkin.

Only the way
he will speak when he wakes.
And it is not softly.

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