HE CARRIED A TORCH

To carry a torch for someone is an old slang phrase for having unrequited feelings for another. It's a phrase I haven't heard for years but it came into my head recently and prompted this.

He carried a torch for me

far longer than was healthy.

I knew this by the cards,

and the telephones pleading cry in the night

that I stopped giving answer to.

Forty years would pass before I watched

his father cross Bold Street,

and I saw the man he had grown into.

I did not rush outside,

nor did I think of him again.

He carried the torch.

Seated in the anonymous window

of a nameless tea-house,

I hid beneath a sun

that sucked the light from his hand. 

Bold Street is in Liverpool. I imaged the narrator sat in one of the tea houses there suddenly seeing a person from her past walk by.
this is only the first draft- watch this space.
I was listening to Serafina Steer today. Here's a live video.