We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage / And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, / We Poets of the proud old lineage / Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why ... (James Elroy Flecker)

6.3.23

Finally

I finally resolve it all in my mind

(as much as one can

grasp the slippery past).


Can finally let you go —

amazed to realise how tightly,

all these years, I’ve clung.


I tell you in thought: ‘You gave me 

everything you could, and then some!

You owe me nothing.’


It feels like

an unfamiliar self

who finally falls asleep.


Then I dream a ballroom

(where we never met in life).

Among the dancing couples,


finally I am in your arms.

Together, we waltz and waltz

round and round and round …


We are free

we are safe

we are smiling. 




Which was followed some hours later by this realisation.




1.3.23

The Sea Doesn't Need Us

The book I just finished says:

‘the waves roll toward us ...

endlessly, as they will for all time.’


A comforting thought in the face of 

our collective doom – that something 

would go on unchanged. (May it be so!)






(The book is When We Believed in Mermaids, by Barbara O'Neal.)


Shared with Poets and Storytellers United at Friday Writings #66.