French Regrets
I was just ten when my friend passed away
For weeks we were caught between
sweltering heat & sudden storms
pacing the tiles to quickly uncover
our outdoor seat, then jumping up
to cover it once more
when inexplicably I thought of the girl
who disappeared 50 years
before, a crater appearing beside my
desk where small & sensible she had
sat the entire preceding year
Her name has slipped way downstream
yet I try to bring her back. But why
now has she come to mind? We were
blue-uniformed & pencil-cased
both shy, sitting right at the back
of Ms Rist’s class, due to go our
separate ways, though I longed to go
with you to the local school —
when the shock announcement
of your death came in that crash
over Paris, 346 souls on
board, all dead, your family included
That plane with the faulty door cut a swathe
through the forest just after take-off from
Orly that spring day 1974. I don’t know
if we mourned — your crater in that French
field twinned with an empty desk
Perhaps you came to me through the simple
act of sitting side by side, or in what Freud
called the return of the repressed
or was it just the guilty harvest of 60 years
when you poor thing, took just ten?
How I wish I could remember your name
I think of you now & then
Copyright Simon Heathcote
