The end begins,
not with the first stain
of red sputum on a white handkerchief.
Nor by fingers grown numb with
seizure from the heart’s decay.
But, with an act
that leaves a toy discarded
in the nursery of early choice,
reviving for abandoned deeds
the doppel-gangers of dead youths,
clothed with reproach and unfleshed
figments of the mind’s high hopes of
futures fenced in a child’s green field,
that now is hedged; and ploughed,
and grown bitter with a
named and known crop.

© James Rainsford 2010