Clear water, drinking in - earth soaked
purple violets and fiddle head ferns
cold bulbs and garden tubers, buds and flowers unfurl.
The mating clash of birds, their chirpy squawks and words
an aromatic lilac trance in a variance of blue.
Grass and toes, cool and cold
northern winds of spring.

This cemetery of broken stones, the gray hanging trees
of moss draping down to the crab grass and leafy lawns.
This silent field of sticks and bones, of breath long gone
tiny grave of an infant child one day old.
Behind this black rusty fence, wrought iron and bent
circling round the dead, a strange cage we'd like to escape
forgetting our fate, we smile and pretend.

There's a storm inside me
it starts every time I hear your laughter in the night,
when I think about the way we changed
from human beings
to some people who can only share
some words written on a cold page;

it's hard to explain how is it that I miss you
when I've never really had you in the first place
and you wouldn't understand
you see
your heart has long forgotten about feelings like these.

still

I hear your voice calling my name
I see you before my eyes
even in my dreams I write you in bleeding lines
and in my waking hours
your smile brings raindrops in my coffee
and tears on the shirt I wear
because once you said that you liked it;


spring brings tulips at my doorstep
but it's hard to feel their perfume
to let their scent in my broken lungs;

people tell me that all I have to do
is breathe



but it's hard to breathe without crying.

These winter trees
cold and shouldering winds
their bending branches unhinge
falling limbs crash and break the snow
further still a secret world of mud and bulbs
that in the spring blooms of tulips and violet mossy lawns
and too, the sun that comes to warm and fills with green the tree arms
this wooded home that breathes with sheltering birdsong.