Twenty

You’re twenty. Taken in your seventh year and now restored
To family and friends who gave up hope so long ago.
The day you would have been thirteen, become a teenager,
The ‘Have you seen?’ announcement came down from our notice board.
We tried to celebrate your birthday with a sort of wake.
That’s how we thought; our counsellors had coached us to accept
That you were dead, and get on with our lives as best we could.
Your schoolfriends we could not invite, too much for them to take.

No one had ever been arrested, nor had the reward
Attracted allegations even from the known inadequates.
The police assured us in a case like this there was no chance
You’d be alive once six months passed, with all appeals ignored,
No matter after thirty six, and thirty six again.
But here you are, back home, your teenage years all passed and gone,
A tall young woman, lovely looking, image of your mum
When I first met her, so we’re sure you really are the same

Adventurous child who never came back from the village fȇte
That summer afternoon we let her slip – until today.
I should be feeling joy, to make up for the desperate years
Of hopeless hope, of anger, aching longing and regret.
In time I will, they say, but will I ever hold at bay
This stomach-churning sense of total failure to protect
You? Will your mum’s dark-rimmed dull eyes begin to shine again?
Not now we know the circumstances of your time away.

Whatever haunts your mind from those long years it does not tell
In your athletic body, easy smile or steady voice –
That voice in which I hear an accent not from hereabouts.
I’d reckon anyone would think that you’d been brought up well
To have such confidence and poise, so educated too.
How could that be? For now at least, we cannot question you;
Your publicist and that policewoman said we must not press.
We must not let these walls of self control collapse, we must now dress
Appropriately for the world’s massed media. They’re at the gate.

October 2009

Refer to: Apr 2020 – Sermons in stones