Inexact, diffuse and deep

Because all my losses weren’t exact

I didn’t think to mourn, or weep
they couldn’t be summed in one neat fact

Days keep them private, and time is backed

thrust into work but can only creep
because all my losses weren’t exact

Friends handle my house with muted tact

and tiptoe around where memories sleep
they couldn’t be summed in one neat fact

The smoke from sorrow isn’t easily tracked

but it’s wrong that diffuse can’t be deep
because all my losses weren’t exact

Nothing at all has shattered on impact;

for they don’t crash, just that they seep
they couldn’t be summed in one neat fact

There’s little left with which to transact

life with its sale of laughter and grief
Because all my losses weren’t exact
they couldn’t be summed in one neat fact.

Lovers' Cove Challenge : Coffee?

Lovers' Cove set a writing challenge, which you can read about at  http://apd-loverscove.blogspot.com/   I continue from Crystal's thought

Challenge #2

Word count: 30

She looked thoughtful, ” I barely know you, yet  there is a connect.  It’s odd, I’m not normally like this.  We need to talk this over a coffee.  Coming? ”

Ghazal : Take my hand

I’ve got no flashy lamps to light, come take my hand

Touch trades off for lack of insight, come take my hand

I don’t know if we’ll tread upon marshlands or common cobblestones
but we will go in together, upright, come take my hand

Anywhere you fall I’ll set you straight and I take it you’ll reciprocate
and once in a while be grasped too tight, come take my hand

Walk the miles with me, or choose to stay, the trip’ll get over either way
It’s not measured in length or width or height, come take my hand

Love’s a risk, and so is friendship we each know this about all the trips
the way is dark but the reward’s bright, come take my hand

Dark needn’t be something to fear, when it’s dark and the skies are clear
that’s when the stars come alive, alight, come take my hand

Forget the common metaphors, the stereotypes that reinforce
light’s always clarity. That’s also trite, come take my hand

Fields

War is not the only arena where peace is done to death ~ Aung San Suu Kyi, at her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

It’s true that war isn’t the only battlefield

where peace is stabbed to death, shred

into pieces by missiles, it’s also peeled

off by gentle hands and torn stone dead

every day in closed cells and sealed

yards, small rooms and the sweep of widespread

placid nods of automated heads.

 

 

And prisons too come in myriad forms

tightly curled buds, cells, walls, snug cocoons.

All life must constantly escape its homes

constantly force open the petals of fortunes

and sail on unknown winds, transform

painfully, trim, hack and prune

and all the same, die all too soon.

There is the life of prisons far away
and there’s life on a different plane
but violence filed in both their dossiers
repeated exercises of mechanical pain
hope and faith are so easy to mislay
when peace is shelled and shot again and again
in all-pervasive, relentless campaigns.

There are deaths on battlefields, and foetuses

strangled in wombs and quickly disposed
or else unborn still, taught clever bypasses
to adult war formations that closed
about warriors aeons ago. We repeat all the losses,
no lessons are learnt, no hostilities paused
only time and technicalities transposed.

Rummaging in the drawer

I came upon an old love poem of yours

the date on the page said you loved me then
as you do now, but I hadn’t read it before
had I done so, I wouldn’t have forgotten

you write them still, but now it’s a different ink

it flows freer, and has a quicker drying time
while the other was an uncertain thing
halting heartfelt words dressed up in garish rhyme

it was like coming upon a picture of your face

an old monochrome batch of tender childhood
pert innocence, perhaps touched with just a trace
of bluster, before it showed the colours of fortitude.

it made the morning flinch, suddenly poignant

as it placed your youth in my old hands thus
and showed that love, even when it is constant
changes into different forms of precious.

Beloved, you are

the constant river in my heart, you are the one

who can wrest my formless shadow from the light
and fill it in with the details of a reflection;

you show me the pools of greed and grief and slight
in my eyes, you tell me that it is more than just a shape,
a darker form of darkness that dogs me day and night;

you are the river, your waves are the ones who drape
the merciless sawteeth of rocks  with waterfalls
smoothing the edge of chaos in the mindscape;

from the secret crevice to where the mangrove sprawls

you run unstoppable as a stream of molten metal,
your oxbows a moat around my defenceless walls;

minds fly, and restless feet, but you can calmly settle

into the course, and effortless, flow over every trial;
treat sharp oar stabs the same as falling petals.

I know you are the river, it’s so foolish and futile

these endless quibbles over names – Ganga, Niger or Nile.

This post is part of the Blog hop Saturday hosted by Andy David.  Read more about that at http://thoughtsofbeautyinthestillnessofdawn.blogspot.com/2012/06/blog-hop-saturday-linkup-2-06022012.html