Milo Watches the Perseids

        except he doesn’t, because he’s
in the tent, wringing his life out of
his phone in pings and swipes and
flashes and finding out at fourteen
that love is like this – signal patchy
as fuck in a flimsy shelter in
unpolluted dark a mile from the
nearest roadsign to anywhere – and
I am his dad and I am actually
watching the Perseids, except I’m
not, because it’s too early by a
couple of hours and I’m sleepy
already and watching what I think
is the ISS and a dozen other
nameless satellites idling, bouncing
or failing to bounce our messages
back, and anyway the weather app
reliably warns that cloud cover will
be complete by the time the show
really begins

Sunday Afternoon Family Bike Ride

12 July 2020

I’m trying hopelessly to capture this:
the yellow shirt you’ve worn since this began,
the sun and green shade round the water’s edge,
your three-week confidence along the track,
your mum’s accommodating swerves, the chat
I can’t make out from this short distance back. 

I’m cycling with my camera-phone propped up
against my handlebars. The sight of you!

The sun is burning through its afternoon.
There will come tea and bedtime, low hours’ sleep;
tomorrow I will need this fixed but now
and now there’s one thing or another cropped
beyond the frame and everything is blurred.
And this will have to do, my wife, my son. 

I’m falling a bit behind. You go on.