Kim Moore

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Working

I saw you taking our daughter to the park.  
You stood outside in the front garden,  
looked down the road at something  
I could not see. Then you opened the gate 
and the pram sailed through like a boat
into the world. I could not see her,  
not even the top of her head, not even 
her hand. I did not say goodbye.  
Now I keep imagining something  
happening, something very bad, 
thinking how I deliberately chose 
not to go outside to kiss her head, 
make sure her coat was zipped up tight.  
I imagine someone taking her away, 
or a car ploughing into her pram 
or a secret blood clot travelling  
from her lungs on the hidden pathways 
of the body, or a brain aneurism,
like on the TV show last night.  
I imagine the world taking her from me, 
how then I would be done with the world. 
And still I left you to fix her protests, 
to follow the trajectory of her finger 
to what she desired, I left you  
to figure it out, made myself sit still, 
stay in this room, out of sight, at work. 
Working, working. Making something  
out of nothing. When she is older, 
and I read her this poem, will she forgive me 
for all the times I did not answer, 
all the days on the park without me, 
when I sat here writing about missing her? 

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KIM MOORE’s most recent collection is All The Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021). Her first creative non-fiction book What The Trumpet Taught Me will be published by Smith/Doorstop in May 2022. She is co-director of Kendal Poetry Festival.