"I hope this finds you in the pink
as it leaves me."  She stares through the window
(beneath her ribs a fist of ice).
He's a snapshot now, a painting
with absence at its centre.  She's a tree,
leafless, birdless, colour smeared by a sponge.

"The parcel came.  I shared the sponge
with all the boys."  She recalls the pink
icing, drops of red in white, leaves on the tree
as she stared - with hope - through the window
beyond the small snapshot and his painting.
It was autumn, then.  Today there's ice

on the road, on the mud - a world of ice
and her throat constricts, thinking of the sponge
she made with love and sugar, of his painting
- a wash of colour, the sky pink
and gold and drifting blue - and beyond the window ...
(now just the black-branched tree).

"When I think of home, I think of our tree
all leaves and birds.  I think of the ice,
that midnight, we peeled it from the window.
I think of your slender hands making sponge
and how, when I spoke, you turned pink.
"I'll be back, you know.  I'll finish the painting."

So now she looks at the painting,
still unfinished, sees the tree
they loved, knows the pink
has gone from her face.  She's cold as ice,
cold as his death.  He ate the sponge
and marched on the guns.  She stares at the window.

She stares at the window
past the snapshot, past the unfinished painting,
and lets her heart, like a sponge,
soak up the pain.  His tree
should always be bare, and ice
descend upon gold and blue and pink.

She made a sponge.  They looked at a tree
beyond the window.  He started painting,
was killed in mud and ice. He was "in the pink."

©2007 Kathleen Bell.  Reproduced with permission of the author.  This work was a commended poem in the 2007 City of Derby Writing Competition.