Flurries

Flurries

She is talking about the weather up there
in the Deep North, laughing as she watches
neighbours chasing their bins in the icy wind.
Casually she tells me she can see snow "flurries.

She has always astonished me with her words,
that she can find so accurately the term
and tone in an alien tongue ' and now
stuns me yet again with the word "flurries.

She is a child of the tropics, a hothouse flower
uprooted and carried to an alien land,
and now, unflustered by this cold new world
calmly tells me how the snow flurries

as if the swirls of blowing snow in freezing air
was merely mundane, unastonishing
as mango trees and bougainvillea
thriving in the Surabaya sun. "Flurries,

she says: she amazes me still, and I wish
I had had the presence of mind to say
to her, (me here in night, she there in day)
listening, my heart, too, flurries.