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Wednesday 12 April 2023

Afterword

The final photograph of 2004 was of my ex, it was taken outside of our house, on Christmas Day, in the snow; she looks moribund, vulnerable; there is that lost soul look in her eyes.


At the beginning of 2005 she was to tell me that she didn’t want to be my lover anymore; she said we could remain as friends, but our time as a couple had come to an end.


I was fearful of such an arrangement, I was even more fearful of being in her vicinity as I tried to build a new life for myself, consequently I left the family home, moved up country.


The poems are created, rewritten or edited in June, July and August 2018. The work is in preparation for an Arvon course which begins at the end of August, it is about putting together a poetry collection.


The final reworking of the poetry took place at Buckfast Abbey, in October, where I found the following words in Hubert Van Zeller’s book: We Live With Our Eyes Open, in a short story entitled Sex:


“Good heavens, so that’s the answer. Well I do call that beautiful, don’t you? Really beautiful. And to think that until this moment I simply hadn’t a clue.”


It is beautiful; all that people are waiting for is the clue.


We had held onto that clue, for quite some time actually.