Stranger Earth

 

I don’t know this city without your footprints

marking out the roads, buildings, the streetlights

glinting on your glasses, your voice mapping

the terrain of neighbourhoods, days and nights.

I don’t know this place, it’s strangely different –

the waters an acrid shade of grey and white,

the neon signs of advertisements pulsing

like a news ticker from a disaster site.

Everything is where it was, yet it isn’t

as if the ground has shifted, ever so slight,

as if the earth’s somehow lost its mooring,

as if the sky’s fallen from a great height.

Grief is a half done crossword by your chair,

an absence the shape of your feet on the stairs.