Lately by Kate Dent

Lately, your eyes have a different hue
and your rib cage is easily opened.
It’s a matter of trust. We take shelter there
arching, scrutinising our younger selves, horned.

Lately, Tuesdays’ meaning is elevated.
the path from Monday’s transgressions and cold
tea clearer, like a passage re-formed
its meaning loose, turned over, muscular.

Lately, the human condition has been
enthralled, infiltrated, rewritten.
Prose hardened in an ancient artery.
Now the queues are for warmth or dignity.

Lately, the photograph of your grandmother
has been looking back at you, from the bedroom’s
corner shrine of dead women you knew and
didn’t know, bound by DNA and fecundity
except for the one that adopted your Dad.

Lately, your child has rested by the haunch
of a sentinel cow, it’s breath heavy
on her cheek, ancestral memory rolling
through them, cauterizing sweat and sunrise.

Lately, the egg, overwhelmed by its own
symbolism, leant into levity
as a coping strategy. And ammonites laughed
remembering their future in a quiet kid’s room.

Lately, empathy was as familiar
as pause for thought, or the returning hero
of a nation forged out of industry
and empire. Sympathy proliferates.

Lately, heading back to you: a privilege.
We break out from the corner of a fresh start
garlanded with years and a lyricism
borne of dissonance, metabolised, honed.