People and Feelings
it’s hard, sometimes, remembering
within the empty city;
i think, once, there were people here
and there was some committee
that you and i belonged to when
there was a you and i;
where we decided how to raise our kids;
which lullaby
we’d sing at night to calm them or
to ease their childhood fear:
but now i can’t remember, and can’t ask –
there’s no one
here
I still remember Stephanie,
The music of her hands —
The lyric autumn reverie,
The eyes apart from coterie,
That far horizons scanned
In Stephanie, the day stood still.
The seasons passed beyond her will,
And life was brief, but sweet —
The short years she was here with us:
One up- and one downbeat
Then Stephanie, my sober friend –
She let go of the fragile cord
That kept her holy essence penned,
And found her Springtime, in the end.
Her loving life restored —
Her aching spirit
Soared
She walked out on these docks with him
About a life ago
In warm and windy memories
That only she will know
The boy who was her everything
Her fading Summer light
Until the darkness took him
Into everlasting
Night
From across a far ravine.
An echo in the forest
From across a far ravine;
The last words that you said to me
In memory still green
An echo in the forest
That my lonesome ears discern:
The sound of your departing
Knowing you would not return
I lost a world the other day,
But no one seemed aware;
Of cities built of sacred dreams
That were no longer there
The country, mountains, fields and streams,
An ocean once deep blue –
These now, no more than memories
I’m solely privy to
I lost a world the other day,
A silent tragedy:
The world of my desire is gone
And no one knows
But me
The shadow of a cloud moved o’er the ground,
I turned around to find you were not there;
No last words of goodbye, no tearful sound –
Just distant highway sounds borne through the air.
How came I now to be here, all alone?
It isn’t the same sun that lately shone
The shadow of a cloud that softly passed
And dimmed the brightness only for awhile,
Across a landscape windswept, gray and vast –
This place is one that most men would beguile.
I walk this shore for it’s the road I’m on:
But find no rest, no haven, and no dawn
And bent now, he who once walked on so proud:
I slowly chase
The shadow
Of a cloud
He walked out on the blowing sands,
And gazed across the emerald sea,
Forgetting all his other plans.
He walked along in ecstasy,
And all his thoughts were with her full.
He thought it all an augury.
From what might come of his heart’s pull,
He did not know, but hoped for much:
A touching pure, and beautiful.
But oft, illusion’s made of such;
He did not know her heart at all:
Buoyed as he was, with phantom touch.
As witness to her siren call
The sea, the sands, and all his thought
Were frames around his lover’s fall
But though much damage there was wrought
At least, these precious moments bought
(“The Emerald Sea” – 7-3-2015)
