3rd Prize Winner Torriano Poetry Competition 2005,
published in ‘Brittle Star’ 13 2006

Rose and Wren
         for Virginia 1968 - 2004

Today, I hoped the sedulous wren

which flitted in and out of a slated pergola,

beak full of insects and nest repair kit,

had come to speak to me with your tongue

but all I heard was the drip, drip, dripping of rain.

I know how to find you. There, in the indigo

of an impossible sky, a flick-back of honey hair

and photographs which keep you young.

And here perhaps where ‘belle virginie’,

a candy-floss rose with your name,

struggles to bloom in this garden

while the wren feeds astonishing lives,

squeezed in tight under the eaves,

swaddled within a refuge from the weather.

What I need to remember is not to try too hard

and there you are, with a dangle of dental floss

between your teeth like a wren on a mission,

or in the rising scent of a pink rose

which reminds me of another garden,

another set of circumstances

              where, on the third day…

 Moira Merryweather

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features by this poet:
Virginia Warbey

Poetry: JUST ano form of therapy?

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