Mary MacRae
Ghazal
Mid-February, small clusters of brown buds
on kerb-side trees already look like cones.
Criss-crossing when and where, only a breath
separates us from the dead, a second’s space.
Re-play the cracked pavement, the swerve of a car -
is and what-might-have-been inhabit my ghost.
What’s past stretches in front, further than eyesight;
childhood is closest, the dead go smaller and smaller.
Rilke said angels move among living and dead:
clouds in the window’s mirror, recalling the absent.
You look up and smile; a rush, my eardrums pop -
we’re transmitted thirty years at the speed of light.
A ghazal is a traditional lyric form from Persia and elsewhere, written in couplets, often taking love as its subject. The couplets are seen as ‘pearls on a string’ that can be arranged in any order.
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