Our wedding anniversary yesterday, and this year for the first time my wife and I agreed not to buy each other cards, given all the hassle with masks, hand sanitisers etc currently attached to going into shops. So I thought the least I could do for my companion of fifty-four years was to dig out this one from my ‘Collected Poems’ and rededicate it to her as some token of recompense for all those times when the process of composition has made me less than usually attentive to her discourse or, as she likes to put it, when I have been away with the fairies.
Against Geologies
Our seconds rain like shells of lime
To build great thicknesses of time:
We watch the secret moments fall
Anonymous beyond recall,
Since who will look for you and me
In those white beds of history?
But if they do, with prying pen
When all our now has turned to then,
Let them not think, because they find
Some particle we left behind,
They know the vanished sea above
That was our salt and sunlit love.
These words I leave for them to learn
Like lily’s stem or print of fern
Are but our shadow in the stone
And all the rest is ours alone.
Then what a world of touch and talk
Shall lie compacted into chalk.
David Sutton
David Sutton 
That’s a beautiful poem, David. It leaves its imprint in me. Congratulations to you and the wife! I wish you many more years of happiness together ❤ ❤
Glad you liked it, Gareth, and thanks for the good wishes. Hope you’re keeping well.
It is a wise and lovely poem. Thank you, David. I came across you and your work just today. I needed help with Robert Frost’s “Directive” — which your exegesis provided (thank you again). Then I read your poem “RTFP,” which I take to mean “read the Frost poem.” It is all coming together.
Glad to be of help, David. Yes, I would certainly always recommend people to read Frost poems, though that wasn’t quite the F I had in mind!