Thoughts on Loss

No mantle was worn,

truth of heart and gentle ways

were how they spent their many days;

I watched two wild roses bloom

into the whitest white,

entangled by summer's call,

their gentle sway to song,

just held by sundown’s sticky air,

and the touch of petal to petal;

only when the harvest moon had

gathered enough love to cover the

quiet slowing to come, did they loosen,

imprinting the night sky with their form.

All things change, the wild white roses

Bow to wilt, spent and so to final petal fall…………

I waited while she slept, watching.

her slow sink, the mattress seemed

to soften, drawing her down,

inch by inch, the duvet’s comfort

falling, coddling her no more;

But she was still asleep,

waiting for the galloping horses

to stop their graceful revolution;

I smiled at the sound of the

laughing man, and felt the

flash and dazzle of gaudy

lights upon my face;

I whispered, ‘Back soon’

and I kissed her, for the first

and last time, but two steps

taken and I breathed a sigh,

so ethereal it could never

be married  with the crushing

sadness I felt in that moment;

then I was back, but she’d gone!

her poison-chrysalis, her

Iron Maiden, the barbed ric-tus

of misery she suffered and

which broke me every time

I saw her, now gone!

I saw her packing the Caravan

for the summer break,

and as she was locking the house,

Nana and Peter pulled up at the end,

he was already singing,

‘On the road to Mandalay’!

Then everything smoked away,

leaving the birds busy about Papa’s

rose-bush;

I said once,

that our lives rise and fall, on

the vagary of so many things,

and appear to be trial, after

trial, is small coin to pay for

such a loan’;

I was wrong,

‘Spare us all’ I sound this petition to whom

or what I know not, but it’s in the thunder

of storms, the crack and fall of glaciers,

and from the felling of man’s tallest towers,

It is the cruellest kick of all, to be

trapped in the mind’s sludge, where

old dreams, and bits of truth and reality,

fade to Super 8 film, jerky and jumbled,

trip and tease, and at times, drop vinyl on

the turntable for a punk ‘blast’ of familiar,

just enough to know that

which you wish you didn’t;

That you’re in La La Land

We mourn

And moments frozen, locking in feelings with

a click of frustration and impotence, of hearts torn

for bodies worn by lack to loss, to fading memory;

What of dignity’s failure, lost to silent

whittle and withering, the naked spirit’s

vulnerability revealed, newborn, grotesque;

there is cruelty here, by man in his innocence!

though we champion kindness still,

we try to bend nature to our will,

forgetting how spiteful the bite of

her ire.

We mourn.

and read the final pages, at the end of

final chapters, and close each book in turn.