Those were the goodbye streets
lovers packing kisses
into one person’s luggage,
the back-pack he straddled
as she gave yeasty kisses
mixed with baked bread smell
from the all-night bakery,
doors open, bread vans arriving,
the long-distance bus risen like a loaf.
These are the arrival streets
empty for a big city
the cold morning smells slightly
of dust and the exhaust
from red double-deckers
that must run twenty-four hours –
he sees no night-workers
coming off shift in droves,
nothing is cooking.
His senses are learning
about central London:
it’s mainly real estate and shops,
he sees no workmen’s cafes
smells no coffee,
the first park he comes to
has polished green leaves –
it seems he’s exchanged
sensual joys for cold freedom?
Yes, the baked bread smell
was from the central bakery –
its red neon sign still glows at him! –
but also from her, Rima,
her skin warm and yeasty,
the girl he can’t write to
from traitorous exile,
goodbye-forever girl
kissed on the home-town streets.
Dilys Wood founded Second Light Network of Women Poets in 1994. Her collections are Women Come to a Death (Katabasis, 1997) and Antarctica (Greendale Press, 2008). She has co-edited Second Light’s ARTEMISpoetry and the following anthologies of women’s poetry: Fanfare (2015), Her Wings of Glass (2014), Images of Women (Arrowhead Press, in association with Second Light, 2006), My Mother Threw Knives (Second Light Publications, 2006), Making Worlds (Headland with Second Light, 2003) and Parents (Enitharmon Press, 2000). ARTEMISpoetry is a bi-annual poetry magazine in which all poetry, reviews and articles are by women solely concerned with women’s poetry.
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