The Queen Of Santa Fe

My memories are slippery and sharp,
and coloured by the heat of her,
adventurous and sweet.

Three months ago, I met the Queen of Santa Fe,
her hair as red and long as twenty seven years.

She caught my English words,

her throne and duty may have been this city in the dust,
but she’d never left her Isis home,
a council youth, a river bank,

a teacher with the petulance to force a lifetime long–haired girl
to cut her pride, to mark the drought of ’76.

She heard my English words

and spoke, exuberant,
compleat of drink and desert glow,
she spread her history.

She kept my English words,

and dreamt her night in Oxfordshire,
as snow touched down on foreign lands
where she will ride forever.