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Sue Butler

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Lighthouse

The plea of the lighthouse is scripted,
a learned line, repeated many times,
‘Where are you?’, a pause to count the seconds,
then again, ‘Where are you?’

It can feel anonymous
until you insert a name that has meaning for you
and then the rhythm holds it safe,
sends it out, brings it back, sends it out.

In contrast, the coloured lights of the arcade,
are linear, seasonal, to amuse they shine full frontal,
a transient message of lager and weekend excess,
roll up, roll up and see what you can win.

The night is still and many layered, newly washed
with a rain that will return later as sleet.
They used to come here often, it was the silence she liked,
the cold on her lips and the being alone with him.

That and the trawlers, beached steeply in the narrow cove,
the waiting of the lifeboat, gannets on the cliff near the pond
where drovers once refreshed their weary cattle,
all that and the beautiful, glacial instability of it all.

By day he comes with others or like now, on his own,
always to listen and sometimes to talk, to tell her
that this morning the car would not start,
that her sister called, the oven needs cleaning,

that the last yellow roses have been browned by a frost
and that still, still, he misses her, misses her.

Page(s) 8

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