Tag: Poetry

The More Things Change…

On By MaryIn Poetry, WritingLeave a comment 
Nostalgia triggered
By some small thing
(A familiar smell, a familiar environment 
Some same old feeling
Swelling within the heart)
Leads to reminiscence

Reminiscence triggered 
By nostalgia
(Remembering the time
The place, the people
That were important once upon a time)
Leads to curious inquiry

Inquiry triggered 
By reminiscence
(Looking up an old friend
A place you once belonged
A person you once belonged to)
Leads to a bookend.

Sometimes it is easy to find the lost
And sometimes the lost is just lost.

That school building was torn down.
That park was paved over.
A new building erected where a copse of trees once stood.
I once knew a pretty boy who went to college
For a while he was a poet, and then he became an addict.
Some are dead. Some can't be found.
Some have married, matured, mated.
Some are deeply happy, successful.
Some I do not remember enough about to find.
Or never knew enough about.

Some doors in life are shut. Some reopened.

But there are a few
That I have always held on to
(I have held on to you)
(I will hold onto you)

prose poem – a rumination on loneliness

On By MaryIn Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

i.

There is a growing suspicion that the fear of dying alone tends to manifest within the soul of an individual that is terrified or incapable of love. When one holds others at a distance, separating emotion and building a wall around the heart, what other end can there be? You see it and can predict it and feel it deeply, bitterly, like Crane’s desert beast, singular, teeth tearing into that dense muscle, knowing that there is no rescue from that fate. Your fear has predestined you. There is nothing else for it. Alone, then.

ii.

There is also a growing suspicion that those that fear being with the wrong love more than being alone are secretly the same. We speak it into being, being too proud to admit the effect of that dreaded “L” word, stronger than love, cousin of love. It is easy to criticize a fault in another, but I have also built my walls. Tended the defenses. Separated my emotions. At the first stirring of the heart, the only course of action is to flee. Declare unworthiness. It is more terrifying to be known, intimately, and thus another fate is sealed. Alone, then.

iii.

I’ve done all my running.
I am an open book, easily found.
Perhaps we can defy fate?

Or perhaps not?

Alone, then?

secret

On By MaryIn Poetry, WritingLeave a comment 

You are the soft song I sing to myself 
Deep in the night when there is nothing else

A wisp of a promise left unfulfilled 
Something I shattered before we could build

Now a memory that shall fade in time
Lost forever, survived only by rhyme

Though thinking else is the dream of a fool
I know your heart was never mine to rule

But sometimes a sweet dream is all we have
So I'll savor this song, my darling lad