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Streetlamps

Then there was more night
than we knew what to do with,
so we went into the street
which had been waiting for us
all that time,

or if not for us,
then for anyone to come
and understand its spaces
the way the lamps do in their
cones of gaze.

We walked between them,
veiled sisters leaning over
their patches of ordinary
and making the moths sparkle
with meaning,

till what we said was
strung out in the same rhythm,
sentences left for the lights
to look at, and in-between

our dark steps.

from Muscovy, Faber and Faber, 2013

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Copyright © Matthew Francis, 2017

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