A single moment;
Captured and framed in time:
Your naked body
Propped against the pillow;
Head tilted with curiosity
To one side
Watching me
Gaze at you
from the doorway
As you captured my nakedness
With a fierce tenderness
That could calculate infinity
I thought then
and I still think now
That
Your lips’ red
was as delicate
and sweet
as roses
turned towards the sun
Oh how I came undone
when they planted soft,
wet kisses on my cheek
to the rhythm of each heartbeat
(The poet never truly sleeps
writing their truth beneath the sheets)
A dream of you
leaves me feeling blue
and waking
alone
again
Aching upon
somewhere to belong
between a lover and a friend
As the time I held
your paper-like, origami shape
in my arms, without fear or qualms
You never questioned
my caress
but drew me closer to you
While the morning silence
undressed
our thoughts at the seams
I cut myself on love
Held its broken shard to the light
And trembled through the night
In a blaze of fever
I tried to relieve her
But my caresses fell upon deaf limbs
and died there
As she returned them one by one
to their loveless owner
And I carried my burning body
Lamb to the slaughter
sleepless and sighing
across a stranger’s bed
Time ticks;
A fragile and volatile bomb
You count the seconds pass
And wonder where they’ve gone
Meanwhile the distant and burning
Stars of outer space
Explode
Into particles of golden dust
Giving human life their trace
Stretched over a vast landscape
Of cells and membranes
The pain of birth contained you
Curled up in utero
But you broke forth too soon
Pale and premature
Watched by the expectant eyes
Of the hospital room
A small and tangled up
Bloodied ball of flesh
Craved the comfort
of womb and breast
Covering with baby hands
Its own eyes from the light
Sleep-full and yearning
To fight for its life
Home is to sleep
Next to the milk of your bones
My soul is quietened; I am no longer alone
Sheltering in the shadow of your embrace
My fingers trace
The graceful curve of your hips
And my tongue your lips
Take me in your hands and wash me
In the juice of our love
For I know you understand
Time stretches us out
Pale and uncertain
Bathing us in a pool of memory
To cleanse the stain of yesterday’s tomorrow
And all that became hollow
The faithful body
A mere capsule
Emptying and forgetting
The contents of life
From ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Refusing to believe
There’s a God we trust
Until we recover our senses
Shake off Death’s dust
And be restored to former glory
Let this not be the end of our story
This poem is dedicated to the late Welsh poet Nigel Jenkins.
You wrote your Death
On the periphery of Life
Unknowing that Death writes itself
In leaves that are turned over and over,
Even the lucky-leaved clover
Planted face-first into the ground, soil-dwelling forever
In that eternal Autumn
Whose blood-red leaves never ceased to fall
Caught on the wind in flight
As Death catches us all
You chose to observe from such great heights
And we watched you look down from above
Your best lesson to us in life that
The next greatest to Death is Love
I imagined you
At the origin of the world
Watching and waiting with weary eyes
For your world to be changed
Boy of bloodied birth no longer
But man of womb and flesh revealed,
Did you cry and crumble
At the spot where Nature’s love was sealed?
As you gaze upon your own
Bloodiness, father of the child that you were
Picturing a new innocence
As Life seeps out in a blur…
From the moon of your face
Flow waves of bounteous desire
Emanating back and forth
Through flickering candle fire
Illuminating the flowering grace
Of your rose petal lips
That pursed in dreaming
Await to be kissed by
The pull of Gravity
That brings you back down to Earth
Awakening from sleep
As from the waters of your birth
I dig myself in so that my traces may you keep
In the heart of my moonflower, anchored crater deep
Floating over this salty skin
My mind wonders in waves, crashing against the shore
Contemplating if life could ever be as it was before
As these tears soak
The skin you kissed,
Its taste the sensation
You said you had always missed
But now the gain of our greeting
Is lost in sad goodbyes
Until under another sun
We will learn to run
Arm in arm again
Until under another moon
We will learn to heal the hearts
That broke too soon
Until under another sky
We will learn much more
Than just the simple touch of rain
We will lift up life’s sorrows,
To no longer drown in its pain
Catherine Lucy Rowland 