I could not foresee that you would be
Much like my father;
A ghost floating in my mind in real-time

Like flotsam on my eyelids.
He talked of petals and poppies and diamonds.
He was believed, and my webbed and sticky

First fleeting look at the world
Was within a fleece of silence.
My heart is filled with an improvised pantomime

Of love, jettisoned in the vacuum where
There is Love which leads to loss.
I did not know that it included you.

I did not know that we would fall to the same violence
Of memory and thought, forces exerting,
Pulling from one another like an injured fox

From a hunting rifle. We held the bullet
Of that hurt in place, to stop the haemorrhaging
Memories from bleeding out into dark pools.

Something similar once was done by Neptune
Using the spikes of his Trident to plug the ocean.
The moon turned away in disgust.

Time’s carriages rattled on,
Built by men for herds of sheep, cattle, loot;
Bloodied fathers everywhere: men, time, gods.

It is what they do best.
I arrived at the Museum of Modern Loss
Where I was tossed from the temporal wagon

Under the bronze, onto platform number one,
(I don’t know why to this day it was numbered,
There was ever only one of those mausoleums).

Where I see the queues forming in mud.
Mud abundant enough to slop into the bowl
Of heaven where new ghosts were whittled.

These men, our fathers,
Compelled by the Goddess to repeat
The mistakes their bloodlines wrote on.

The ghost resurfaces. We have nothing to say.
A question unanswered, a code stood uncoded.
And suddenly, without warning, my daughter was stolen.