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Learning to read you, twenty years ago, Over the pub lunch cheese-and-onion rolls; Learning you eat raw onions; learning your taste For obscurity, how you encode teachers and classrooms As the hands, the shop-floor; learning to hide The sudden shining naked looks of love. And thinking The rest of our lives, the rest of our lives Doing perfectly ordinary things together — riding In buses, walking in Sainsbury's, sitting In pubs eating cheese-and-onion rolls, All those tomorrows. Now, twenty years after, We've had seventy-three hundred of them, and (if your arithmetic's right, and our luck) we may Fairly reckon on seventy-three hundred more.
I hold them crammed in my arms, colossal crops Of shining tomorrows that may never happen, But may they! Still learning to read you, To hear what it is you're saying, to master the code.
U. A. Fanthorpe
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