Birthday

Today has been my wife’s birthday.


I scrawled and scribbled but the words would not come;
Each scratched phrase failed to catch
My sense of you. Then a sigh,
A stirring of the bedclothes,
The imprint of your cwtch against my back,
The graze of a toenail, a half-eyed gaze
At your dim form fringed with sleep,
Reminded me of the words, the only words
We ever uttered that really mattered:
’I do’ and ’till death us do part.’