25 JUNE 1994, Page 30

Now

Now she has gone closed in a jar as paper rustles round seeds.

For fifty years she has lived alone with her husband and child by the London streets.

Now she is free to fly home.

Like a lift of the heart the plane shadows the Alps, as a hand crosses wrinkled skin, back to the broad streets, enamel stoves the white slope crowded with pine.

Scatter me back to the sun and the wind.

In the snow of the bed, he wakes.

no bird, no pulse but her blind return.

We were never earth.

Our dust aches.

Alison Brackenbury