We fell in love when we were eight,
our child was born when we were nine:
a tiny thing with gnarled black teeth,
a rough grey beard and rosy cheeks.

It grew up to keep a hive of imps,
behind the shack where it lived alone;
it said their honey made for healthy skin
and bottled it in jars from bins,
and stacked it up in racks of gold.

Then it heard about the gorgons
who, shunned and ugly, cry for love
with every mouth of their writhing heads
and never know its gentle touch,
as they ever-spin in loneliness.

And every night it combed its beard
and carefully washed its lovely skin
and brushed its tar-black teeth, and felt
ashamed to know such suffering
and turn away like any coward,
while it piled up facial honey.

One market day it sold it all
and even tried to sell the imps.
It bought a rose in a purple pot,
a box of chocolates called Romance
and a wedding ring of real gold,
then headed for the station.

We used to laugh that if the gorgon
ever got to see it coming,
with its hopeless smile, its rose bush and its chocs,
she’d hide until it went away.
We’d imagine it asking for directions
and shake our heads in mock despair.

But that was many years ago
and now a silence stands here all the time,
like something died and the fault was ours,
and every day we have to pass
that awful shack and the burned-out hive.

What use is a stinking gorgon anyway?
It is us our baby loves, not some thing.
Please tell us, do you have some news?
We’re frightened and we want it home;
but only if it comes alone.

We stood in silence in his croft,
as he swayed upon a three-legg'd stool,
in the whiskey-hues of hearth-light
and from his fiddle tore an air,
so low and wistful and so lost,
as to deepen every down-turned eye
and stir the sorrows in the rain.

And Old Nan mumbling on her bench,
who once could blow on knots and sink a ship,
or make a hermit fall in love,
cracked a vacant ruined grin,
unlocked the silver in her throat
and sang the moonlight on a river.

And we the gathered island dead,
all crammed together in the flicker
among the rafters and the drying fish,
between the sacks and well-worn tools,
did not move or moan or give a cry,
to see how song can make a world
from the trash of memory that remains.

Now with the fading of the night,
we're gone like frost-thorns from the pane
and Nan and John are left alone.

In truth there is no heaven yet above,
but hours like these are living things
that minister softly to our needs:
for we ourselves are unheard songs,
that lying out here in the dark,
await the singer who will come
and sing us on his golden tongue.