Ella was my first love - an immeasurably deep love. Too hot the eye of heaven shone, and when we split I thought the pain would never end. I sensed then that I would never again feel that same intensity, that same desperate longing - and so it proved during the nineteen years that followed: the nineteen years it took to re-build a grey-scale but contented life. I got into the habit of not thinking about her any more, and by then had other commitments to honour.
Then out of the blue one morning, unbidden and at odds with all other thought, came a vision of Ella: dead, lying in a coffin on some foreign shore, surrounded by strangers in mourning, and no place for me. As vivid as any memory, it tore a void in my soul; I don't know how close I came to a breakdown, but I do know that it is only through discovering poetry that I've managed to cope.
And here is the record of that process (that something worthwhile and enduring should emerge from it): Ella's Flight is a collection of eighteen poems on the theme of 'first love lost'. It would mean a lot to me if you were able to connect with them...
