Lemnos Poem by William Fay

Do you remember our first garden?
How tall we let the grass grow;
How the wild roe would roam, quiet,
To the apple tree, to the acre of swamp,
Where frogs would spawn and birds fed.

Remember the nightly invasions, the dread spider,
Or the long eared bats, crazed in the eaves;
And our little grey mouse, remember, yes,
How he ran nightly through the make do kitchen
Of our rundown, salt-smashed, old farmhouse.

How wonderful it all seems now, you and I,
That far away summer, in our borrowed house,
Where our young island love first bloomed,
As free as the sea birds and all the flowers
In the meadow, we could not, at first, name.

We had 'no running water' you say, years later;
How young we were, how reckless 'like shipwrecks'.
Your vintage field guide, like our first cookbook,
Like the pocket atlas of the heavenly sky,
Still sits on the shelf, unread for years.

Between its yellowed pages you once pressed
Careful the wild specimens you picked,
Learning all their names...Now I open
A stained page and blow into the quiet dusk,
Grey dust, the powder remains of a last flower.