Creation

Years ago, she drove me north and north and north,
on a mystery trip, to a tiny cabin in Kielder Forest.
I observed grumpy barn owls clicking on their posts,
disagreed with the angry signs about grey squirrels,
watched salmon burble along tunnels, technicolour.

We lumbered up to the dark sky zone - in daylight,
were back down before nightfall, nothing witnessed.
It would have terrified me, such starry, tender clarity,
such sheer open person-less space for the universe
to stretch and shift and bathe, skin itchy with comets.

I stood by the great lake carved out from the earth,
tried to grasp that it just didn't exist for so, so long.
I read about a baby born in a cabin, a life rewritten,
a world terrifying, spiralling, opening - and so still.
In my mind, there was never any doubt of the setting.