by Elizabeth Loudon

It’s been suggested to me that I’d do better
to have a lie-in instead of waking so early 
full of foolish hope, making the dog paw  
at the curtains frantic as ever for her first  
elusive kill. That nobody cares that I’m awake  
to see the smudge of last night’s peach in the sky 
or the fox tracks black on the wet lawn, 
that sensible people are heaving their arms 
and legs from left to right, smoothing the pillow  
for one more dream, and I am blessed to be  
a woman with cotton pillows who never need  
rise at dawn, nor shrug a pack onto her back,  
a woman with no reason to climb  
to mountain cairns above the sling of a coll  
nor to place on their conical heads a stone  
like a million other oval rain-worn weights,  
scarlet and silver splashed amid grey,  
stones I think I can bear in my pocket. Others  
don’t trudge up nameless paths whose wooden signs 
rotted to splinters years ago, trodden by  
so many long-dead pilgrims that not one  
toughened blade of grass survives to cut  
my skin, nor push their faces, whipped by wind  
and streaked with exhaustion, into air that thins  
with every step. I’d do better to let the pillow  
hold my head, reach over and find your soft  
and lonely hand that holds no pen and join you  
in the unspoken. I say so little anyway.  
I only take small stones from here to there, 
leaving them where nobody will walk until  
spring melts the white hem of another  
winter snow, swallowing ice inch by inch until  
there’s nothing to see but granite under sky. 

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Elizabeth Loudon's writing has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, INTRO, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Blue Mountain Review, and Trampset. Her debut novel, A Stranger in Baghdad, will be published in spring 2023 by Hoopoe Fiction. She has an MA from Cambridge University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, and has taught English at Smith College and worked as a fundraiser. She lives in England.