A-walking through the foggy wood
I found a Roman urn
It marks what seems a noble grave
but its fate took a turn

It lacks a name or token word
to tell just who lies there
It blankly stares right back at me
without the slightest care

The puzzling urn says naught to me
I sit in somber peace
and then the answer falls in place:
it’s a grave for all deceased

For all the nameless of the past
the memorial stands here
The grandest grave that ever was
Unsung now sung I hear

he doesn’t take his shirt off anymore
he never really liked to, but now he never does
“I’m sagging. I have wrinkles,” he says through beautiful crows feet and a sad grimace wrapped by dimples lengthened through smiling as hard as he lived
once, he was young
messy, poor-intentioned, headstrong, mean
when his smile lines started staying
it was new

are you ashamed you became an antidote?
or that you were once poison?

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

I hope I do not fade away
like the stars at dawn.
A footprint
left on the desert sand;
a dream that is lost to memory.

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