In this poem of regret our poet Andrè Mangeot sensitively describes the silence of loss and of not forgetting, regret clinging like smoke. Day 774 of the Daily Poems.
Smoke
In from the garden, still later from the bath
it clung on – in your hair, in my sweater’s
thick weave – the last bonfire won’t let us
forget these years, not the black ring of grass
scorched there outside, the heat on our skin,
snap and spit of mildewed boxes, or wet leaves
spinning their ash-ghosts: what we breathed
in building the fire, nor through its burning.
Is it why I’m down early today, breaking habit,
mist on the lawn, house silent, lighting up
this first cigarette since Frèjus, thirty-odd
years ago? Tapped from a long-buried packet
of Gitanes, cellophane-fresh, faint still
with pine-scent, now it glows in the gloom
like a tender’s fog-light and I see you again
through the same bluish haze, pausing to lean
on the rake, hand raised, brushing hair from your eyes
as if on a steam-shrouded platform, waving goodbye.
Andrè Mangeot
first published in Fenland Poetry Journal 2023