From A Watching Brief, this one seems apt
The collection was published in 1987 & was dedicated to her partner, Rosemarie Bailey, so I guess it is fair to say that it is deeply personal, & also that the wish for 7300 days more was granted
And how lovely to have an understated poem of private passion in these days of fame, celebrity & gossip
7301
Learning to read you, twenty years ago,
Over the pub lunch cheese-and-onion rolls.
Learning you eat raw onions; learning your taste
For obscurity, how you encode teachers & classrooms
As the hands, the shop floor; learning to hide
The sudden shining naked looks of love. And thinking
The rest of our lives, the rest of our lives
Doing perfectly ordinary things together – riding
In buses, walking in Sainsbury’s, sitting
In pubs eating cheese & onion rolls,
All those tomorrows. Now twenty years after,
We’ve had seventy-three hundred of them, and
(If your arithmetic’s right, & our luck) we may
Fairly reckon on seventy-three hundred more.
I hold them crammed in my arms, colossal crops
Of shining tomorrows that may never happen,
But may they! Still learning to read you,
To hear what it is you’re saying, to master the code.
