in blissful moonlight

convoy of snails on green earth

multicoloured snouts

Peeling pink onions
Pungent journey toward core
Deep cleansing delight

Liquid moon sprinkled
In the swings of blue-green sea
The crazy chasers

Look back at tulips
On mountain tops in mauve sky
Tense blue rings of smoke

Tonight poets will find the words
to color their life and dip their pens
in wounds that aren’t even their own
and some will stare at the moon
seeing an empty plate, hungering
for something without a name
or a clock with no numbers knowing
time carries a dagger and a sword
for the hours that wound and nights
that cut throats, arrows that pierce
hearts fiercely until they lie still,
cold and bled out on a bed all alone.

It was a graveyard and overcast sky
and I sat with book and accordian in hand,
hearing the world with its screams
swallow up around me.
The people whom I had loved and lost,
Papa with his silver eyes
Mama her sharp tongue and tough love
Rudy whose hair the colour of lemons
and questioned why, the living and dead,
worlds apart, yet both did not have a choice.
I stood and screamed so that everything shook
the burning rubble and ash and dust
willing my words to bring it all back
but it did not come, and my breath rose in gasps.
Death had looked me in the eye and said,
“It’s not time yet.”
I would shut my eyes to the world
only decades later.
I will understand that there was hate and pain
there was sadness
but even more so, there was love and joy.
I will know that the people I loved had reason
to kiss goodbye
whether it was their own hurt
or saw it as a necessity,
but they were never truly gone from me
always somewhere nearby,
in the thick and thin
frail and worn
of times.
I would learn
to forgive Death that day.
I will understand that
and I will be hurt,
but I will be okay.

~

Not all deaths are sad.
Some, meant to ease their own pain,
Are called freedom.
While some,
Meant to ease the pain of others,
Are called love.

© BT