Learning to read you...

Saturday's Carol Ann Duffy poem prompted me to seek out this poem by U.A. Fanthorpe. It's about a couple who've been together for a long time but are still learning to read each other. I found it through a great anthology 101 Happy Poems edited by Wendy Cope.

7301 U.A. Fanthrope

Learning to read you, twenty years ago.

Over the pub lunch cheese-and-onion rolls.

The rest of our lives, the rest of our lives

Doing perfectly ordinary things together - riding

In buses, walking in Sainsbury's, sitting

In pubs eating cheese-and-onion rolls.

All those tomorrows. Now twenty years after.

We've had seventy-three hundred of them, and

(If your arithmatic's is right, and our luck) we may

Fairly reckon on seventy-three hundred more.

I hold them crammed in my arms, colossal crops

Of shining tomorrows that may never happen,

But may they! Still learning to read you,

To hear what it is you're saying, to master the code.