The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Anthony Foakes

Communicating

The day slips away on rain-slicked streets,
a radio loud and full of sound next door,
and the light shifty as clouds fuss around
out of control. In the room the daffodils
you arranged to unfurl by the window
make all the difference. I like them there,
better than words and the scramble of meanings
these carry in their unforeseen baggage.

What we have done, are doing, or plan to do
is not that important. The travel section will serve
to browse the world at random, Mexico, Tahiti,
Spain, pictured in perfection, sunlit scenarios
for those at a loss, but we have no desire
to go anywhere as long as we are together
and the frontiers between us have been abolished.

Spaces are all much the same, what we move in
to our chosen rhythm. Time is the problem,
as the light thickens and dies, and we see
petals falling more often. Time is, finally,
all we have, moments that blaze into life
and store for us a cache of ghostly renewals,
memorials of love, of what really matters.

The millennium has vanished in a burst of fireworks,
and we need not have bothered. The light has gone,
and the world soon dwindles to a coloured screen
neither of us is watching, as you smile at me,
and we carry on as if nothing will change.