The invitation 

What are the things I have not done?
Driving America
seems clear and distant as the moon
when I stop my small car.
Through March’s dark, a message comes.
‘Do stay with us, and walk the Downs.’

So I reply, with caution, find
her father’s gravely ill.
Yet this joins all that falls behind,
not what is coming still,
how, hummed by bus through Sussex towns,
I climbed with Sasha up the Downs.

Alison Brackenbury’s latest collection is Then, Carcanet 2013.  Her next collection is due from Carcanet very early in 2016.  New poems can be read at her website:
www.alisonbrackenbury.co.uk