By Silver Stream

Your dad and me cast a pebble
in the giggling, churlish water.
We watched the ripples grow;

nine months later you were born,
and for three decades, the ripples spread
on and on...Until

five years ago we cast your ashes
to the outgoing tide off Southwold Pier.

Today, your sister quietly sits, not
by silver stream, but by the sickbed
of a child – leukaemia of the cruellest type;

a relationship spawned,
thanks to the worldwide web,
two years ago – begun by sending
puzzles, games and toys; she’d signed up
to be a ‘Chemo Angel’,

bringing some kind of normality and routine
to a child’s...a family’s fraught life, and yet
she has no answer when they ask her,
‘Why?’

She asks that too...so do we, most every night,
and the only comfort we take, your dad and me,
is in the knowing those ripples go on, and on –
and some.