when first we faced and touching showed

When first we faced and touching showed

there stood how much our meeting owed

to other meetings, other loves

The decades of a different life

Belonged to others, lavished, lost

Nor could I hold you hard enough

To call my years of hunger strife

Back for your mouth to colonize

Admitted: and the pain is real

But when did love not try to change

The world back to itself – no cost

No past, no people else at all –

Only what meeting made us feel

So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?

Pictures by Margaret Kwan, poetry by Phillip Larkin.