While the rain’s holding off, we’re walking back
the other way to the old rowing station
where, several years ago now, we ate,
then watched a harvest sunset sheen the lake.
With gifted flowers for health and luck,
we’re newly absolved from sin,
and I’m thinking how, here, that sound
might signify both ‘blue’ and ‘son’
and what I might have passed to mine …
Only now, at lake’s edge, is not the time
when there are finer details to
discuss –
the words for ‘crocus’, ‘cactus’, ‘sloe’,
stork legends, rituals of a green season,
that solitary rower crossing the water below.
Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips
