MARIA ZAJKOWSKI
- From the manual of time;
-
now, me and you
-
- I’m looking at a century or two;
we’re somewhere in there,
- maybe our births will be noted if
we’re lucky, maybe not if things are as they are.
- When I’m two hundred years old
I’ll look into the crowd and still pick you.
- Alas it’s all gone to pot in most
ways. Lucky that when we are pages in some old temple
- in our fallen (now falling) civilisation
that someone will have pressed
- my cheek against yours.
- Gravity at least still functioned after
the destruction of most of what we knew;
- my house, your house, our favourite
songs, the corner where I met you with flowers
- and where you met me with flowers, our
preferred routes away from the uncertain crowds.
- Some of them were outraged, most of them
not, at those few whose decisions
- closed gates, erased births, who ate the
finest quails raised by children.
- It will all be omitted, as the truth
often is.
- Pens will be broken while still in our
hands so it cannot be written about.
- There will be no official letter to
confirm how I ranged the outskirts of my life
- and miraculously found you where not even
a saint would send a prayer.
- We renovated our remaining lives in
secret, working late into the night almost in silence
- and fully moved into our bodies at last
which was not in the council’s plans
- but what they didn’t know…
-
- It has however been registered that you
discovered me and we are our own remnants,
- our own philosophies and friends, always
friends, on any night, in any age,
- simply we are have forever been in love
with me and you.
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