Today, as it is out, I will turn my face to the sun –
the mild cold enlivening, mid-day with jumpers off.
I feel I am emerging into something.
The shadows along the trail go cringing back
into their shadows.

There is more life to go around my limbs:
the head-cold not debilitating; work’s
Irritations risible again.
A whole and plausible structure rises
dripping from the slough.
Soon it will put out legs and lumber onwards,
tolling its great bell.

…

I explained to my children
as they were broaching adolescence
not that a feral interlude was upon them,
in which they would inexorably want and do
wayward things like Max on his wild island,
but that new information was incoming,
a destabilising glut,
and that all the charming self-possession
of late childhood - the completeness in herself
of an eleven-year-old sat with a reading book –
would be put in jeopardy
most unfairly
by the newly-necessitated
building out and knocking-through.

…