Listen to the author read this poem: [audio: issue3/surani.mp3]

(i)

You visit each day in a different dress,

a clear umbrella for the rain.

Coffees.

And one day this week,

with a daisy

whose stem you sawed

with a kitchen knife

 

 

(ii)

Only the magnolias have squandered their colour.

Their shells convalesce over the neighbourhood lawns.

Just yesterday

you brought me some,

but pulling their corpses from

your book where they lay clamped,

you thought again and discarded them,

stepping through my door with the story, the gesture.