I have written a lot of poems over the years. The subjects range from love and relationships to sports - all over the place, really, kind of like my blog. Some of them are intensely personal and probably shouldn't be shared.
This one (one of the more shareable), however, is one of my favorites. I added some remarks a few years later that I'll include in parentheses following the poem.
Split second flashes of hopes & dreams
Unhoped for in my daily schemes
Are but illusions to be filed away
When he expresses his doubts to me this way.
I'm not solid enough to hold fast
While he's scampering -- breathing his last
Breaths of freedom, non-commitment & daring do.
I can't handle it. Should I? Would you?!
My years in therapy were spent for me,
Not for someone who wants to stay free!
He must be allowed to go his own way,
If he truly loves me, he'll want to stay
Forever and work things out
Together ... we're both in doubt
And fearful of another marriage
But that's no reason to disparage
The name, the question, the love, the want
That's in us both! Leave us, past! Don't haunt
Us with fantasies of what might have been!
I want him here ... holding my hand
As I want to grasp his with all of my might
And not let go, even when he's out of sight.
Leave us, past! Can we not start anew
Like each day, when the dawn breaks through,
Shedding its light & hope around
Where before all had turned to brown?
Why cannot we, like the one who believes,
Be like the trees, turning our leaves
Toward the sky -- with faith and trust --
That we be nourished and our love not rust
In the weathering of knowledge & human-ness.
(Except for the line, "As I want to grasp his with all of my might And not let go, even when he's out of sight," I imagine I would write one today of a very similar nature if I were in the same situation. I would not wish to grasp his hand quite so tightly today. I didn't then, either. It was only in the poem.)
I didn't put a date on this, because I'm not sure exactly when it was written. It would have been somewhere in the very early 1980's, with the added remarks written before I started driving a taxicab in 1989. You can see what a dreamer I was!
3 comments:
Goldenrod, you have a real talent in writing. This is so expressive and beautiful.
Thanks, Tammy. I have to be deeply moved to write poetry - wrote not a single poem in the nearly 18 years I was a cab driver. Strange, huh? I guess I must have just tucked my emotions and feelings away somewhere really deep.
However, it's kind of interesting (to me) that I now find myself looking through some of this old material and thinking, "Hmmm." Who knows? I might be 'just a whisker away' (one of my bridge partner's expressions) from a new one.
Did you get my e-mail about "Save the Whales?" Whadja think about that?
I take back what I said about not writing a single poem when I was a cab driver. Have been looking back through my earlier posts - there are a couple, specifically, that I want to find for a couple other projects I'm working on - and came across one that I wrote in 1995 (Valentine's Day) when Serendipity died. It was included in (part three) of the series titled "Serendipity," and was published on February 29th. If I run across any more that make a liar out of me, I'll fess up. :)
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