No high alert

 

I don’t have to close my eyes to see your face,

it’s in passing clouds, in each clod on the road,

it’s been outlined in the rise and fall of days –

as winters have frozen, as springs have thawed.

 

As summers have stormed in with their fangs bared,

as the lissom rains have twirled on the ground.

I hear your voice in the soft, whispered prayers

of the sea breeze in trees that it weaves around.

 

I don’t have to prime myself body and mind

I don’t have to take any extra care,

to sharpen my senses for symbols and signs.

Wherever I reach out blind – you’re always there.

 

However great the time and space we’re apart,

you’re with me still – nothing needs a high alert.

A scheduled post - because I'm on a short break in the Nilgiris but I'm reluctant to let anything disrupt the hard-fought fortnightly schedule of posting here. Fortnightly? is that archaic? I never see people use it, come across it anywhere in writing either, unless it's 'period' writing. Ennyway. I digress.

What I meant to write was that I'm quite unsure how to label this poem - all love poetry feels like something else too, to me - deeper than the glib labels words define. However, the lines have come about because of an old 1970s photo a childhood friend posted on a social media platform. I oohed and aahed over it, I'm a sucker for old snaps. It struck me later that I've managed to remain in contact somehow through all the intervening years with all the people captured in that photograph, though we each are continents apart at this exact moment and have been so through the major part of our individual lives. 

Should poems be labelled to reflect their source of inspiration? On a different note, isn't that - that I'm still able to be in touch with them - an ineffable blessing and a celebration deeper than words? 

Hope your month has begun well, have a wonderful July.