Advent poem 1: Joseph

Joseph

 

They say there are signs.

Not with her.

 

I’m no professor

but neither am I stupid.

 

I asked her who she’d been seeing.

She sat there murmuring ‘Angel’.

 

She went north a few days

– change’ll do you good.

 

The solicitors said to forget it.

‘Without proof…’ they smiled.

 

If anything she started to brighten:

‘They’ll be cousins, same age!’

 

(I can’t be sure,

but I think I saw him, too.)

 

We left it too late, of course.

The traffic was solid,

 

some pop idol on the hire car radio

massacring ‘Hallelujah’.

 

We stopped at a Little Chef

on a B-road somewhere in the hills.

 

Crystal midnight it was,

good as daylight.

 

Then she grew wild-eyed.

Her bawling, a blunt saw,

 

cut through me.

It wasn’t like in the songs.