Deeper than even the wood pigeon’s gloom, 
and always arriving just too late, 
in light less than a shuttered room, 
our other lives still wait. 

They wait for all that might have been 
had we but turned the other way. 
They have looked into the years and seen 
the emptiness of their days. 

Between the second glance and the first, 
though now uncertain of their names, 
they gather on platforms in autumnal mists 
and wait for trains that never came. 

They are walking in a room we left, 
still talking to another’s ghost, 
to this day they are still bereft - 
we did not stay and at what cost. 

Forever on a staircase they remain, 
above footsteps receding in the hall, 
their time will not come again 
that did not come at all. 

Somewhere between the then and now 
they look back at us and beckon, 
if only to learn what they always knew, 
theirs was the path not taken. 

Habitues of sequestered lanes, 
of sidings overgrown all along, 
they wait for us under mounting rain 
and look to find the time is wrong. 

They gaze in mirrors that give nothing back, 
no one being ever there. 
We might find them if we take 
the time to look, but find ourselves elsewhere. 

As bound to us as much as we 
to them, decisions we never made, 
they live their lives vicariously, 
forgetting they are dead. 

Their music is the dying fall, 
their season the autumn and its mists, 
those footsteps receding in the hall 
might be our own but we do not exist.