My weather girl

Tonight you told us our tomorrow will

be changeable, though starting dry.

You spoke with all the confidence instilled

by science and facts – but I could see

anxiety alive behind your eyes.

They spoke of unslept nights, of the debris

and disarray of home where dawn

no longer gracefully unfolds but bleeds

a crimson warning to the day;

of weather fronts where storm clouds follow storm.

The data show that winter’s here to stay,

but you persist with your forecast

of early spring, where daffodils display

above the snow, proof of the heat

still stored below. It will not come to pass:

your husband’s love affair with self-defeat

ensures that every sign of thaw,

however mild, is just one more deceit

before the sky turns dark again

and elements resume their climate war.

His voice, as you drive home in sheets of rain,

reveals he’s turned once more to face

the buffets of the private hurricane

he mocks and dares to do its worst –

from his retreat within the sham embrace

of grape or grain. You close your phone and curse.

Your stomach seeps with acid fear,

uncertain if the threatening clouds will burst

upon the night ahead. I share

your dread, and drink my numbness deep and fast,

to be inert when you reach here.

(Published in the Kent & Sussex Poetry Folio, 2016)