Nothing Is Lost

Nothing Is Lost


Somewhere in the limpid depths of time
I hold you still
sleepy with lovemaking,
as we let the day pass by outside the shutters -
the bright, hot, August midday of the Midi -
and I am touching your dark, tangled hair
while the cicadas sing us into afternoon,
sliding my fingers across
the angled slopes of your skin,
while you wonder, in your half-sleep,
what love is and whether we are in it,
as we lie cradled in the old bedstead,
in the rented room, in the simple house
near the brilliant blue harbor of Cassis
in the South of France
in nineteen seventy-six.

Nothing is lost, say the scientists,
but only changes from form to form.
Over thirty years we have changed,
finding other loves and losing them,
learning and graying.
Now across the sea,
perhaps you look back also
to see us lying there in that moment:
tender and tentative,
young and impatient,
beautiful, without knowledge of our beauty.
Somewhere we still lie there, entwined
in what we now both know was love,
love which is not lost after all:
changed, but cradled
deep within the recesses
of our hearts.


Sarah Unsworth MacMillan
July 2009