i.m. Brenda Breen

Just weeks before you died we came to visit.
We stroked the trembling rouged mantilla of your hair.
Your body had capsized into your clothes.

For a moment now I'm following the hearse on foot again
through the narrow lanes of Dalkey. There's a soundtrack
of nothing as we pass. We look across the sea to home.

Suddenly, beyond the Forty Foot,
nose tipped to falling light, I see her,
like a lost child or a sea-fox in a blazing world, that lone seal on a stone.

Deryn Rees-Jones is professor of poetry at the University of Liverpool and editor of the anthology Modern Women Poets. Her most recent collection, Burying the Wren (Seren), was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize