Blueberries

Blueberries

Blueberries

I am in California. The moon –
colour of grandmother’s Irish butter – is lifting
over the Mount Diablo hills and the sky
is tinged a ripening strawberry. You sleep
thousands of miles from me and I pray your dreams
are a tranquil sea. Eight hours back
you watched this moon, our love-, our marriage-moon,
rise silently over our Dublin suburb, and you
phoned to tell me of it. I sit in stillness
though I am called where death is by; I am eating
night and grief in the sweet-bitter flesh
of blueberries, coating tongue and lips with juice
that this my kiss across unconscionable distances
touch to your lips with the fullness of our loving.