all the letters you wrote

carefully in biro

(the same pen that lay on the desk

from when I was small

to long after you were gone)

criss-crossed in gold

resting

on the small neat pad of writing paper

blank pages

and a lined insert

offering invisible order

at university, which I took for granted

and you longed for

a generation of women denied flight

I read each one

but I hadn’t grown enough

to show how much I loved them

your familiar curls of blue on the envelope

snippets of newspaper

tiny tales of home

decades later I sob it all out fresh

to think of how few I replied to

how my pages back could have lined your nest