Like the first glistening snowfall
Over you, over me,
Nothing was cast, but grew from timeless olive eyes.

Quiet as the focused night
Holding me in its cupped hands,
Listening close for the sea inside the shell.

A thousand stars are raining,
Feeding our skin of trust,
Already wetted by the dew of grateful tears.

On meeting a doctor who listened.

A pin-prick window into universes strung together
By the child's searching eyes through the looking glass,
Alice, what do you see in the swaying?

A pearl rolls shyly in her palm,
Where should it go in this reckless world of gold
To avoid the jaws of jewellry?

In the shallow water hours pass,
Small things flicker and swish
A toy ocean of holed white calcium tumbling.

She knows herself in the tide,
The memories threaded close around her neck
Waiting for a new wave to sift out the sand.

A childhood memory of diving for Puka shells on Maui.​

It was their cries that could teach you,
   A pure piece of heart sung from the mouth, needing you to swallow and take it to your own
If you dare, you might fear your fear of crying too, 
   An aria of your sliced red muscle that maybe no one would catch.
   What then?

It was their freakish smiles that could reach you
   Amid the rude schedule and the unkind commute, time bangs his tyrannical scepter,
The toothless gap ignores, widening and narrowing as it mimics your uncertainty,
   The eyes so sure you will show it how, they don't blink,
   Only the gums shine worry.

It was their sticky hands pasted on the nape of your neck, never letting you go,
   So strong, they tugged you across an ocean beyond time,
To the warm cave they never forgot and clung to through the storm of becoming, 
   Holding you so you will know how to hold
   An unbreakable connection.

On the completion of a manuscript about mothers and children.

A glove rests on a traffic light,
A child fallen asleep mid-play
            Someone picked up off the ground and tucked in lovingly on a perch.
            Above the mud and the melting sleet it dreams of the hand at home,
Of dry warmth and sticky sweets.

A mask hangs limp near the front door,
Exhausted by the burned landscape,
Smoke rising in thin dancers tempting rain.
             In the flood, a sea horse drags the mask, parakiting in reverse, 
             The burden it must bear for my breath.

             The sewing lady came to stitch them onto me,
             My uniform of glove and mask,
Steeling me in the confusion of traffic 
When the red light begins to flash.

On finding a child's glove at the traffic light.