Darkness and tolls – they linger, side by side they loom.
I’ve seen my life tomorrow, in a densely shallow tomb.
Doom is closing in.
A weight of times forgotten, sanity has its costs,
Fading at a hero’s pace, all light in the night is lost.
Doom is closing in.
Free of contradiction, fawns of fate arise,
resign the conscious battle, deathly fear subsides.
Doom has closed me in.
Do we fall into a deep coma of nothingness
or do we rise, shaping clouds
listening to conversations downstairs
flickering lights, moving objects, sending signs
through telepathy
transmitting a forced white noise
invisible to the blind eye
waiting to be a reincarnate of ourselves
in a different casing
or a trickster
making the living believe
Peeping into the cage
At my mom’s atrocious call,
I figured out life
That haltered at my neck
Somehow.
The mother bird was to become
Medea.
The beak was stony with
Solidified blood,
Like rock salt upon the poor man’s table.
The featherless end
The crucial end.
The unmotherly end.
Bones in the sand
from the shores of history
the curse of the pointless point
the dog slinks back to the underbrush
he can see the blood in its teeth
fearing the virus
in the darkness of it’s mind
it has cut all ties
with love and trust
knives clutched in
dismembered hands
death awaits the madness
hate filled expression
in a leaking coffin
the trees cannot sleep
they hear the screaming
through their leaves
standing in caustic rain
an old dead volcano is stirring
it has angered the
oceans of magma
burning rocks and
blocking the sun
all disappears in it’s molten path
nothing will grow
for one hundred years
the birds and animals weep
it has shaken the
very nature of things
with bellicose vessels
and sails of black
sorrow exploding
from ugly flags
shutting off life
and the light in the eyes
beautiful dreams
run off and take cover
living forever
before the after.
For four decades death was a stranger to me.
I empathised, I offered my shoulder but I did not really know death.
Then, this year, death came.
An uncle, an aunt, another aunt, a friend.
Death came, they left.
The clink of tea cups and teary smiles.
Cold and waxy sunken cheeks.
“No more pain now Dad”, my daughter tells me with her smiling, bun-filled mouth.
She is four years old.
She is right.
An old woman is
dying on her bed.
Her husband is sitting
by her side, clasping
her hand with his wrinkled
hands and through the open
window a breeze slinks in
and embraces
the couple as the
day is dying fast.
But neither of them
notices these. It isn’t
worth admiring the
beauty of sunset
nor grumble to the
cold embrace of the
wind—not this time though.
The old woman smiles.
To her husband,
As if she’s not going
To die. Just having
a deep slumber. “Do you
You think we’ll meet again?”
She asks. “In an afterlife,
I mean.” He nods and
says “Yes, we will,” not
because he’s certain.
But it’s kind of a good
prospect to hear.
“Don’t forget me darling,”
she says and shuts her eyes,
and there are tears sliding
Down her cheeks. The husband
waits, though he knows she won’t
wake up again. “I
won’t forget you, my love.”
He bends and kisses
his wife. He barely
notices the tears on
his cheeks. Now he
just has to wait.
He only wishes the waiting
won’t be long.
Smugly draped in mortal darkness
She bade a familiar farewell
And named the date of return
There were no hazy hints
On that morning of departure
She was brought back
By a wailing ambulance
Indifferent
To the wailing welcome
And the mournful faces
The children still rush out
Chanting ‘mummy oyoyo’
Each time a car stops
By the bereaved homestead
Hoping mummy has returned.
The photograph of her face –
bold as one who knows herself completely –
as the bagpipes blew
and I could hear her voice
gently humming the tune.
There were strangers everywhere
in the crowded room of grievers and
in her daughter’s eyes. It was
only her
I loved and her I will miss.
She cradled the land ever so deeply
and dreamt elaborate and graceful worlds,
etched in the smoothest of stones.
She is shared by so many.
But for me, my love was personal,
and it is not so easy to hold
this severed vine of gold, not so easy to let go
of her rare and destined heart
that helped give shape to my own.
More at http://www.allisongrayhurst.com.
—–
Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Three times nominated for Sundress Publications “Best of the Net” 2015, she has over 1050 poems published in over 425 international journals. She has sixteen published books of poetry, seven collections and nine chapbooks. She lives in Toronto with her family. She is a vegan. She also sculpts, working with clay.
on the beach
a homeless man
steals lost fries
spring dusk
saying goodbye
to our sleeping child
robin’s nest
on leafless branches
snow in my shoe
blown out candles
only you
at your wake
empty cradle
a rowing boat drifts
on memories
moonlight
singing nursery rhymes
at your grave
new day
dreams silently float
on a rainbow
your lost child
on the beach
licks an ice cream
spring sunset
your sleeping child
dreams of shooting stars
autumn dawn
listening to the rain
through an open window
More at https://twitter.com/Haikuintraining.
I am a dead man’s
heart coming to a sputter
old rusty engine
I am the late summer
turning locust back crisp
ready to fall from a tree
I am time running out
on a scratched tuneless
record about to skip.