Crossing Over

Crossing Over

Crossing Over

I drew abreast of them in the drizzle
that drifted across a railway-bridge,
two young adults, wrapped in scarves,
who’d spoken that evening in church.

They’d stood in front of the altar,
a man and a woman, beside a priest
and a great bowl of lilies and aloes
and told us how they lived with aids.

The streets they climbed, so slowly
that Sunday night had gone all quiet,
as if the fear of some terrible event
had emptied the whole small town.

The feeble blurs of the street-lights,
sunk in the mist above the bridge,
had greyed their stooping shapes
to phantoms in some life beyond.

A moment! I said to them, hollowly.
Thank you for visiting our church!
They paused, and turning their eyes,
their wan and haggard young faces

towards me in the misting gloom
greeted me with a cheery warmth
that made me want to curse aloud
and turn my face aside and weep.

They drew back, sensing distress.
I hugged them, and for a moment,
a strange short eternity out of time,
I felt their presences hug me back,

I who lived this side of the tracks,
in the suburbs, the gardens of life,
and they who’d already crossed over,
into the hard streets of life-in-death.