I'll count to twenty by taking off my shoes
and tromp into the littoral
wary of glass still unworn
wondering if we would still hold hands
on your twentieth birthday
while splashing the only wet salt
our faces would need
in two decades of birthday beaching
I wished we had.
I have so many questions of you
that only wise youth could answer:
what float would you toss your brother
with his mouth just above water?
would you vote next year
against the onrushing tide?
how did these years drift past and fast
into this hollow belly
while you still dust an urn
and I'm just dust with out you?
.....
.....
a doubled 55 for Verse Escape on the 20th anniversary of my daughter's birth, and death
Sorry man.
ReplyDeleteHugs.
This is so terribly sad... All the things that could have been. 20 years is normally that important landmark of life.
ReplyDeleteBeaches are a place where the veil is thinner than usual--all sorts of visions and hauntings can pass through...twenty years is not enough time to think of all the lost questions...I don't think a hundred years would make it easier.
ReplyDeleteIt is hard to find words to express the emotions such a poem instills. I have come to realise that life is little more than keeping a tally of loss, until you become the lost. Twenty years ago, I did not know how brutal it was going to be. When I read this poem, I think of the poet then and wonder at the fortitude that got him to now. Yes, there is light and shade and love to fill the places in between, but days, too, to grieve again.
ReplyDeleteJust the first line is so powerful on its own --- because her toes and fingers maybe weren't counted; so you had to count your own. Then I think the glass is a reference to a Cinderella slipper, never worn. (Maybe something like this song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nrWMBC6yoME.)
ReplyDeleteThe last four lines of your poem are so powerful.