our lives are small things, easy to miss

what I see: a guardedness that cannot hide 

the unmasked plea for love passed down 

from mother to son. 

Our lives are small things, 

easy to miss. The truth is 

they do not belong to us at all, 

but must, in the end, be returned 

to the sky: to that same mottled distance 

so like the speckled blue of the bird shell 

I found when I was six 

and she was thirty-four. 

It was broken, that little suitcase, 

and the dried and wasted shine 

of a fallen life was stuck to the shell. 

 

[Jim Moore {1943- } from 'The Long Experience of Love', in Underground]