We build a pyramid of driftwood and tangled strands of seaweed, light a match
inside your cupped hands and watch the fragile flame catch, flicker unsteadily in the wind.

The sigh of the fire holds all the words I have no voice for,
tomorrow you will leave this city, home for five years, to travel towards new life in Canada.

We walk together across the cooling sand to the edge of the ocean,
you slip quickly out of your clothes, walk boldly away from me into the freezing sea.

Your pale head and arms bob on the dark waves. The sea sings to me of the womb,
the fleshy cave of abundance in which our tiny, fish-like forms took shape and grew.

We struggled through the same walled darkness, pushed out of our mother’s body
on waves of salty longing, washed up on the generous belly of the earth.

I turn and walk towards the glimmer of light burning within the descending darkness,
the outline of two small girls holding each other, illuminated by the fire.

Emily Hunter graduated in 2006, and now lives in Canada.