Roll Of The Dice Poem by jim hogg

A pencilled note, a photograph.
A bloom you seeded long ago
still sprouts most years on this old path,

but probably you'll never know.
You made your move a few days late
or willingly I would have walked,

my hand in yours, out through the gate
and down the road towards the Loch,
where cold waves kissed the Cockle shore.

We could have stood against the wall,
we could have held each other close,
and maybe more, or maybe not.

But looking at this print of you
I wish somehow we could have tried.
Those moments in the Fine Fare queue

when twenty years had passed us by
were like a raw electric shock.
I saw your hands shake, and your voice

went missing when you tried to talk,
as I passed panic off as poise.
And all my life I've loved your hair.

I watched it bouncing as you crossed
the sports field at the Glenluce Fair,
a further fifteen years beyond

that little rolling of the dice.
And that was long before these thoughts
of different tracks, of different lives

of different ways of getting lost
where cold waves kiss the Cockle shore,
where warmly up against the wall,

we might have held each other close,
my fingers through your flame red locks.

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