a world
of distant voices and glittering echoes
painted with a thousand sunsets
that I've poured into my eyes
to find some relief from this tiredness
Days walk beside me, years run ahead
I wish I could collect all the silences
between all that I've said
and fill them in with things
I've lost to time
Thank you notes spill from my hands to yours
The permanence of things begins to fade among dialogue once shared
There is a world I have spent building
With stories and reminders
you left for me
I hope you'll find in it
the transience of an anger
that ceases to be

Take back the memory.
You have it.
Yet how can I give something away I don't want to be without?
Sometimes loss is the best thing.
Why does it not feel that way now?

If you knew
the games of chess
I play with you.
You would wonder why
you win so easily
whilst it is I
who loses her king
each time.

What is it like to go from white
to black,
move along the squares, the moods,
whilst I'm here wishing to go back.
Take back my faulty move, return
to those halcyon days,
toasting under the sun.

The rain should have been a sign
for those days long gone.
That our day is past, our time is through,
for not much longer would I lose you

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

from Poetry of Presence An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

Mayflies
by Michael R. Burch

These standing stones have stood the test of time
but who are you
                             and what are you
                                                             and why?
As brief as mist, as transient, as pale ...
Inconsequential mayfly!

Perhaps the thought of love inspired hope?
Do midges love? Do stars bend down to see?
Do gods commend the kindnesses of ants
to aphids? Does one eel impress the sea?

Are mayflies missed by mountains? Do the stars
regret the glowworm’s stellar mimicry
the day it dies? Does not the world go on
as if it’s no great matter, not to be?

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose.
And yet somehow you’re everything to me.

Originally published by Clementine Unbound. Keywords/Tags: mayfly, mayflies, time, mist, transient, transience, pale, inconsequential, stars, sea, everything, A. E. Housman quote

“Til the rocks melt with the sun;”
Is that how long love goes on,
Beyond the trappings of time and the outer contours of the mind?

I learned of love within the cadence of Celtic songs.
Daddy played them on an old piano
And mommy sang along.
The walls they rang with something that wasn’t
Really so hard to understand;

The aching of one heart for another,
Always swept apart by the sea
And the way a lifetime
Can make it too far to reach
The other, distant shore.

But the sorrow at the core of Highland songs,
I understand better now;  
Now that every tangible thing from those years
Is gone,
Their voices silenced and a home knocked down,
Lullabies buried in the ground.
The piano sold and gravestones too far away for me to hold,

But love, love is the Moorland in my soul

And it is wide and open
And the purple heather grows
Forever and descends to a churning sea,
And melodies, on the wind, they whip between the rocks and disappear.

And though I can no more grasp voices from the air
Than hold love here,
I will stand on this shore and I will sing these

Forgotten refrains

And though they drift across the sea,
This love has been worth it all the while,
Even if time carries it away,

Like music,

And it never comes back to me,