Margot Saffer

You came up next to me
With your camera around your neck
Like a cross

Once upon a time
at the bottom of the world
or the top – depending on which
way up you are standing,
There lived a little girl.

You wanted to help so many people
There was one, right here
looking in your eyes
asking
‘help’

You rubbed them and said
‘It hurts my eyes to look so close.’

My unthinking tongue
has been pickled in karma.
I say nothing more.

I stir and I stir
insoluble irony
into my coffee

Last year
The same school shoes sank into cemetery sand