Fragmentation

… for a while there’s only time and flesh to pass before the rising sun.

Looking through the half-cave the moon

     was shining already like a sun.

It was barely past midnight

     and your words were caught in silence.

Hot water rose from the depths of the earth

     like a short-lived Apocalypse.

None of us moved.

And it happens that tonight is a night picked from a hundred and one

other possible nights,

I thought that these hands would

     not breath through the air again;

until earth slightly shivered and paradoxically

     the cave gave life to butterflies;

which instantly flew high and far

     above the heated waters

their dark wings blurring the moonlight.

each spinning lost between the stars in the silence…

I told you that the morning

     is well known to always come

and you looked back

to where the cave seemed to end

to where darkness was absolute

impenetrable even by the overarching moon.

And just like that, our

     ritual days of living

were over

     without our realising what it is that’s being done.

20 July 2019,

Samothraki.

Verses in italics are taken by A. F. Harrold’s poem ‘And Looking Back’.

Photograph: full moon and clouds over Chóra; 18 July 2019.