Spaces

Huge crimson doors flung wide
shameless as a strip-tease
reveal a cavernous space
empty of fire engines,
and four black lace-up shoes tossed
higgledy-piggledy on the concrete
smelling of socks and haste.
Shouts and running trembled
to silence in the exhaled air.

So it must be in war-time when
young pilots scramble to the skies
leaving half drunk tea, a bitten sandwich,
a hangar, ballroom-vast and lofty,
echoing with the age-old
adrenelin of going into battle.

But there are greater spaces still
recently vacated, large as light
palpable and noisome
wind eddying in the rafters,
and clues to read them:
spectacles sightless on the hall table
a book, face down, wordless, by the bed.