through the absences

Apologies for recent lack of blipping - bit busy with the day job ...

... but here's one of my favourite Edwin Morgan poems, taken from the pictured 1997 collection, which I'd highly recommend:


For Love

What is more real than love? Unseen, unheard,
not even mole-like, not implied or inferred,
not born, not shot, not listed, not interred.

what is less real? Did you see it go by,
on the motorway, across the bay, the sky?
And yet the loss of it has made you cry.

We search so blindly through the absences
that nothing could more captivate the senses
than apprehend, silent presences.

We move towards them, feel that they enfold us,
plead with them to really want to hold us.
They disengage; they had to; so they told us.

But patience told me love was no illusion.
To stop pushing; fate takes no collusion.
To be so unintent that the profusion

of possible joy was not imaginable.
Until I pulsed in your throat, until
you pulsed into my throat, we took our fill

of things more immaterial, not more true.
What is eight years if the warm flood comes through
to do at last what waiting could not do?

If lovers often dwindle into friends,
friends can become late lovers, make amends
for habit, live with beginnings and not ends.

Armies of time, once summoned, are soon massed.
We run to meet them, disappearing fast
into a future that soon too is past.

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Edwin Morgan (1920 - 2010)

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