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)