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7th February, 2025

Friday Poem – ‘Porch-light’ by Ruth Bidgood

Close-up photo of a glass porch light shining in the dark.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Porch-light’ by Ruth Bidgood from her collection Time Being which won the Roland Mathias Prize. It was published most recently in the anthology A Last Respect.

Porch-light
Years of friendship, from childhood up –
why, seven years after her death,
this trivial memory? I can’t stop thinking
of her porch-light, that would spring on
if someone came to her door in hours of dark,
or lurked, slunk nearer, passed.
When sometimes
it came on unexplained, it shone
unnervingly for half a minute, perhaps,
then switched off. “Only a cat or something,”
she’d say; I’d think “or something”,
and not be reassured.
In the isolation
of my hills I had no such device;
slept soundly, ignorant of whatever
hovered, probed, slid or padded off,
maybe returned in the black night. Here
at town’s edge I sensed something to fear –
and indeed there was, for her,
but no light signalled the slow approach
of that which knew her name and habitation
and would not leave without her.