The profile on the pillow
After our fierce loving
in the brief time we found to be together,
you lay in the half light
exhausted, rich,
with your face turned sideways on the pillow
and I traced the exquisite
line of your profile, dark against the white,
delicate and lovely as a child's.
Perhaps you will cease to love me
or we may be consumed in the holocaust,
but I keep, against the ice and the fire,
the memory of your profile on the pillow.
—Dudley Randall (Roses and revolutions)