A Poem for World Poetry Day 2018

Spring is a time of renewal, so here's a poem on that subject from my collection, Breadcrumbs. It has an epigraph from a letter written by John Keats to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana Keats, in which he says 'We are like the relict garments of a Saint: the same and not the same: for the careful Monks patch it and patch it: till there's not a thread of the original garment left, and still they show it for St Anthony's shirt'. 

Relict

‘We are like the relict garments of a Saint: the same and not the same’

                                                                                              John Keats

Her mouth forgets him first, her tongue

sloughing his aftertaste hours after their parting

Next, her skin divests itself. Within a month

there isn’t an inch that remembers his touch

Her quickening blood scours love’s taint,

the shadows darkening her heart retreat, grow faint

Three years and the hair he preferred cropped

falls past her shoulders in torrents, never the same river twice

and although she still feels him in her bones

it won’t be much longer before he’s gone

and she’ll be herself, the same yet different,

the relict garment of a saint,

a patchwork sail on the leafing mast

of Theseus’s ship

©Deborah Harvey 2016

Breadcrumbs is available to buy from Indigo Dreams Publishing and the usual outlets.