Love can take many forms, as this poem by Angela France demonstrates. It comes from The Everyday Poet: Poems to Live by, edited by Deborah Alma (Michael O’Mara Books Ltd., £9.99).
THE LIGHT BENEATH
She looks up from the potatoes, sees him in the garden
and watches as he levels a molehill. He spreads earth
over the border, scrapes the ground flat, bends
to dust off a low leaf. She knows he will clean
his spade, wash his hands and leave his boots
in the mud room before he comes to sit at the table
and wait behind his newspaper for lunch.
~
Friends ask how she copes with his dour silence.
She could tell them how he’s got up first for thirty years
to make the coffee, how he’s always folded
his warm legs around her feet on winter nights,
how the first blooms of summer are cut for the kitchen
table before she knows they exist. She couldn’t explain
how once, when she was ill, she woke to find him
watching over her, hollow faced.
~
She sees he’s flattening another mound as a neighbour
stops to talk. She can see the man is animated,
fast-talking, pointing and making sharp stabs
in the air. She can guess that he offers suggestions
of poison or traps. She doesn’t need to hear her husband
to know what he says as he turns away,
She’s heard it before: They lighten the soil.
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