On Their Fifteenth Birthday (1st February, 2021)

These days they know you only by your hands,
still fussing, cleaning smudges, finding partings
precisely as your daily act of love. They leave your house
smooth and pink as a Roger Hargreaves illustration.
They don’t know your heart aches for their tender past
so soon gone – wished away sometimes – now lost.

They are young boars, no longer your twin piglets;
almost mature, invisibly bristly to the touch.
They don’t yet hunt, just forage for fun, giggling
at jokes you can’t understand or, worse still, do;
dirty boys that still scrub clean when the world hurts,
but joy in sensuous muck they think they’ve invented.