Unable Not to Keep Mourning Her Death

(‘Tells with silence the last light breaking’)

Tells –    

utters / informs / relates … and ah, 

what Katherine did was relate

with –    

alongside, in the company of … she was one 

who was never away from, always with

silence –    

absence of noise, deep quiet … she could be 

noisy, loud with laughter, yet in her presence

I found deep peace; we could be quiet together,

needing no words (though, both, workers in words)

the –    

definitive … to define her would take many words

or none; one could write pages of rapturous description,

which would have to include somewhere her laughter, 

her huge capacity for joy – yet wholly fail to capture her

last –    

at last, the end, finality … but there is nothing final about

this long friendship, sisterhood, true understanding, ever

light –    

shining, radiant, illumination, clarity, the light of knowledge 

… she shed light on the hidden; also, alight, lit up our lives

breaking –    

coming apart, fracturing, dividing into pieces … separating 

into past and future, self and other, here and gone, alive / dead

Inspired by a prompt from Laura Bloomsbury, for dVerse: Taking a Fine Line Down.

A word acrostic focusing on definitions of the words chosen. The line, 'tells with silence the last light breaking' is from Dylan Thomas's A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London. (To get the formatting to work on the blog page, I needed to put the words above each verse instead of to the left – which perhaps differentiates it from an acrostic, but I think it works as a poem.)