For Sarah Selzer
The arithmetic suggests you might have been
conceived on the night ferry to Dublin.
That, with a drive across the republic
in August, and a week of spuds and Guinness,
of Sweet Afton’s and of Passing Clouds,
of fuchsias, escaped from some gentry’s garden,
purpling wild and red down narrow lanes
where family men fought a ragged war,
rocks at Hell’s Mouth, white and bleached as bones,
the lullaby lapping of Bantry Bay,
and sailing home across a violent sea
to our newly decorated, newly
furnished south-facing flat at the top
of an old house almost as tall as its trees,
may explain your sureness with words and people,
with colours, and textures, and keepsakes,
your sense of irony, of justice,
of the absurd, and your certainty
that what matters most is love and kindness.
By David Selzer