Posted in Passages

Here & There

Posted on by tq1695

Like so many before
I asked, then pleaded, for another chance
“just tell me what …
NOTHING  DOING : her mind is made up.
I felt like a teenager, to be expected I suppose,
I was 19.
Still,
I didn’t get it, like Sylvia’s Mother just wanted to talk to her
– “ not here.”
The sun was just leaving for the North,
all year, 
as trees bronzed from green to empty, then green again,
I saw her everywhere,
even though I never once did.

19 turns 28
a lifetime between such brackets
she approaches me in a shopping mall
wants to talk, catch up,
I am visiting my parents: about to leave the country.
Should I have been more generous?
Sorry I said, one more day then I’m not here,
a lot to do. Maybe next time –
knowing a next time unlikely.
I was busy, but hindsight considers it a little ruthless,
thinks time could have been squeezed
and
been mindful of another time,
the time when I had wanted to talk.

Advertisement

Author:

Most of my life has been spent on the bench, occasionally called into the game by extravagance or attenuation. Waiting has turned a loner into a recorder - nondescript and inconsequential, more not noticed than overlooked - the non-vantage point of children not yet considered old enough to understand. Orphaned Islands (Un)poetry is a lifetime of picking anecdotes up and not throwing them away. Stories collected like odds and ends placed in a box in the basement, the garage, the garden shed - uncertain as to what their use might be but knowing that one day there might be one.