paper armour

There is a strange rhthym here,

The noise of our children,

Beautiful, irritating and perfectly chaotic

Recedes

Silence comes

We are at peace with a deep loss

And then the children return.

These tides of joy and loss,

Ruled by tense accords,

These calendar scratchings of yes and no,

And careful keeping of records.

They form a paper armour,

To enclose where we mingle our little and big hearts,

We close ranks around our children,

And define our love in paper charts.

All these forms and pen marks,

Define something quite distant,

From what we burn in our bodies.

All these hundred reunions, and thousand separations,

Recorded in ink and paper.

Yet nothing can circumscribe them

These thousand separations.

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