Martin Robertson

Now and Then

Song
for Thomas

The girl in the train looks out with brown eyes

fixed and lost.

What is she looking for?  What is gone?  Why

this black frost

on a spring face?  She really can’t be said

a pretty girl

precisely, rather a cleverly remade

pretty doll.

Bright bleached hair curves in a cunning fall

round masked skin.

Only the fixed brown eyes seem to reveal

someone within.

Self-made? self-murdered? blank as a solitary

prisoner

she is looking blindly through those lost eyes

for her brown hair.