The turmeric yellow of your hair And the brushed green of your dress Mingle in the cloth of your checked coat. With gorse and grass they coalesce Until you seem no longer there. Your head amid the bobbing gorse Is one amongst a thousand lost And all the words I never wrote About you burrow into the frost In rebuke because, of course, I am not mute for want of love. Rather, I’ve been stunned for months And continue so until, a mote Of gleeful laughs between two stumps Of clumpy grass, you wave your gloves And my daughter is made flesh again, Skin and limbs soft-fresh from the cleft Of earth, the human throat Giving voice to the cry that is left Of the language that came before men. And so the Firehills are set alight, Green-yellow the glow as the frost starts to thaw, But as the words rise up I note They are just a function of what I saw. You’ve conjured a poem I did not write.