A step from me

In August last year I wrote about Tom Paulin’s poem of hurt and slow healing ‘A Lyric Afterwards’. It wasn’t the first time I have talked about it here – but I did think it would be my last. But no. There has been birdsong. And last week, after work, like someone asking us to enact our back-to-normal lives for a scene towards the close of a film, we walked ‘by the river’ and you were, in those lovely four words ‘a step from me’. I had noticed ‘this great kindness everywhere:/ now in the grace of the world and always’ before, but not ‘a step from me’. Four little, simple words, suddenly larger and more vital than the luminosity of those they set up at the poem’s close. A step from me. A miracle. Here you are. Here I am. Our routine was broken by carnage, and now we might be on the way to reclaiming it. A step from me, the evening ‘crepuscular and iambic’, by still waters seeming suddenly depthless though only yards from pebbly rapids splashed in by dogs. A step. The natural and essential gap between any two people at walking pace. You nearly went from me. But you didn’t. And now you are back.