Words for Doris Pigeon

(A Quaker died aged ninety-two)

I’ve no idea, dear Doris, what love
required of you. Though your name
this morn was mentioned in Meeting.
Like a light, blown skyward.
The ash of a woman on her way.

Dorothy Partridge, they might
have said, or Betty Peacock.
But they didn’t. It was Doris
Pigeon. A name I sit with in my shed.
Sunday night, dusk grown fig-deep
yet somehow in that dark, a light.

Love never needs a sense of self,
accomplishment. Doris Pigeon,
in her end may have only
sat watching witless birds dawdle
sun baubles on the lawn.
As I sit now with Doris and light’s
Pigeon-refracted rainbow.

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