OTHER POEMS

Here’s to Everyday Miracles

Here’s to courage, strength and hope

Here’s to love, embracing the faltering in warm arms

And never letting go

Nothing but the here and nowness of you matters;

Tides persist, skies heave and sway and the damp earth nurtures

Still, the smell of you feeds me, my soul’s small self

I cannot breathe with joy!

Here’s to everyday miracles

Magical marvellous Midsummer Night

Magical marvellous Midsummer Night;

With its dreams of a future that hastens too fast

Was the sense that our present is ever in flight,

Like the swift-dipping bats, as they silently passed.

Magical marvellous Midsummer Night!

Full of musical joy and Shakespearean rhyme

That held onto a moment and captured it tight;

All was hidden, misplaced and revealed in that time.

Magical marvellous Midsummer Night;

As one chapter is ending another one starts,

In the damp of a garden suspended with light,

While the music of memory cradled our hearts.

The words I cannot say
The poem I cannot send

The words, "how are you doing?" trip like automatons over my lips

Too late.
For I know too well that a fragment of something intangible

has lodged in your soul,

opening an inviolable wound.

I imagine you now live in a perception of what it really is

to be (or not to be) here on this heavy earth,

because that other place has slipped through

and with invisible hands

stolen the beat of your life,

leaving the taste of 4am in each moment.

Do I want to know that

with a hazy forgetfulness you awake rapt

and are destroyed every single morning?

Sometimes, you say, the soft drum of remembrance fades in slowly,

sometimes it strikes like a wincing knife on bone.

"How are you doing?" is a hollow nothing

Because I cannot bear that pain.

It is yours alone

and too private.

You have become a glutton for grief.
You devour it to fill the empty space that was once
the living, loving flesh of your flesh.
And you howl with anger as your sorrow slides away
down a flume into nothing,
only to be replenished.

For all you really want is life as it once was,

with him returned.

The smell of him, the breath of him

his whole self; solid, warm

held and loved entirely.

I am the light that soared

bursting from nothing into brilliant being!

When the dark sky wraps a thousand dreams

in a blanket of winking stars…

there am I.

I am the brightness in heavenly streams

of consciousness

I am in each particle that floats

and spins on moonbeams

I am the almost imperceptible warmth

that melts frost-spiked leaves.

The normality of variety

Life in all its random games,

The breadth and depth of thought

The expectation of experience

The journey ahead, around, above and beyond

each path you tread.

I sing exuberantly

in a voice that clears the shadows!

Poised, watching, sure.

I am the answer to silence,

I am the love that will endure.

I am ready, steady GO!

The ebb and flow

Of Hope, Potential.

I was and always will be

Playful, sparkling

Possibility.

For Silas

Gabby Dawnay - writing and artwork

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OTHER POEMS