Poem for Sunday morning

it's Sunday morning in July; the sky
powder-pale and clear
trickling around the edges of the still-drawn blinds with blue-ice fingers 

and no one is awake but me, and possibly the old dog, snuffling blearily around in his garden
the dawn-screeching cat has returned to the heater's embrace and wheezing slumber, and all the people
are still lost in snores and dreams

and my belly still stabbed me when I got up to fetch tea,
but a little less sharply than yesterday,
a little less miserably, as I hunched my old-woman crawl through the cold half-lit house
watching the sparrows chitter and pick at seeds on the winter grass as the kettle sang its morning song
a flinty smell of cold leaves and dew-soaked concrete in the air

and tomorrow my daughter will leave before the light to go to another country
she will end her day in hot bright streets, while we, left here, shiver and draw our blankets tighter
travelling with people she has loved a long time, in memory of those
who, lost, are no less loved

and she will eat strawberries and sing karaoke in summer, and remember
and hold the memories up to that warm golden light
weaving absence into presence
honouring them and keeping them
gone beyond the gates, but still a part of the vast and growing city
that is her life, and every life

every thing that happens and every person who happens to you
the ones who stay for fifty years and the travellers passing through
the ones who slide away too soon in twilight or under the moon, and the ones
who stick like a burr in your heel
all adding a stone to the walls, a picture on a street sign
or a little plant that blooms unexpectedly in a later season
spilling its profligate sweetness into the astonished air

building and remaking the architecture of your life; this ensorcelled map
that draws itself new with every morning
the dark alleys and the closed-up doors
the secret gardens and the open squares
all the ghosts and all the hopes and all the pains and all the richest treasures 

all the love you ever knew or could know
and all the loss, which is the price that love requires

written out in the leylines of your life
a living city, intricate and wonderful 

a miracle:
every one.