All I saw was lit up by your body

This week we're delighted to share another beautiful poem by award-winning poet Christine Webb. 

First published in 2011, her remarkable work Catching Your Breath 'celebrates and mourns her partner of forty years, who died in 2006.'

Knowledge

That moment suspended in the dull room

above the streets of the January town

(a branch pecked on the window, but the curtains

shut out the garden of dead chrysanthemums)

– undressing for each other the first time

all I saw was lit up by your body,

its gold and ivory. Such knowledge to bring away,

to carry wrapped through the streets, past naked trees,

into the school where heating pipes clanked and gossiped,

where blackboards expressed decorous equations,

where at the corners of corridors we might breathe in

to pass each other, but did not speak or glance

in case the doorways should break into leaf,

in case the books we carried should burst into flame.

Christine Webb