Blueberries

I am in California. The moon –
colour of grandmother’s Irish butter – is lifting
over the Mount Diablo hills and the sky
is tinged a ripening strawberry. You sleep
thousands of miles from me and I pray your dreams
are a tranquil sea. Eight hours back
you watched this moon, our love-, our marriage-moon,
rise silently over our Dublin suburb, and you
phoned to tell me of it. I sit in stillness
though I am called where death is by; I am eating
night and grief in the sweet-bitter flesh
of blueberries, coating tongue and lips with juice
that this my kiss across unconscionable distances
touch to your lips with the fullness of our loving.

by John F. Deane