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Francie Lynch Nov 2014
I've been adding
To my landfill,
All my earthly years;
Backfilling,
Filling spaces,
With blades
And brushed off tears.
The diggers will uncover
Loves that now are cold;
Wrapped as
Memoried mummies,
Alive while I grow old.
Prying spades will
One day dig
My community of graves.
Ryan O'Leary Dec 2018
Since moving back to Ireland
from sunny Provence, I have
become somewhat anxious
about our hidden pots of gold.

I met a Leprechaun in Mallow
yesterday who told me that all
the holes in the road, were due
to trial digs by The World Bank.

Cork County Council are waiting
for an EEC grant before they even
consider backfilling them, for now,
they are being used as bird baths.
though a storm can reveal a tree’s roots.
their essence remains.
through the soil, through every crevice.
a home is still a home.
no matter how far it moves.
no matter how fast and far time moves.
the eyes learn different than hearts.
the body reacts. soon lost in the gaping hole
backfilling a testament with everything tangible.
hearts like tree roots.
grow and they twist, and they turn.
they will always be there.
my heart seeks to learn from yours.
growing big and thick.
though a storm can reveal a tree’s roots.
very seldom, does it remove every root.
beneath the skin, where my heart and yours exists,
layer after layer of dirt blessed by the gift of life.
no matter how much the storm rages.
a piece of you and I will always exist
Rollie Rathburn Aug 2022
Every person
even if only once,
should take a moment
to lay out every
memory they’ve ever accrued,
each thing they’ve ever known
on the bare floor of a storage room
and bask a few moments
in their snap jazz hum.

Hot tea summer walks,
waterfalls to swim below,
singing to pets
in a window pane flat voice,
and home cooked meals
beneath dusted desert moons.

Mark each and every one
with a fresh scrawl
on a blank surface.
Capture their energy
just before it evaporates
from our plane.
In this way you can build anew with masonry
no longer hewn from pain,
exchanging old omens
for uneasy knock-kneed hope.

From this moment onward,
your world will no longer have space
for anything
less than a miracle,
no matter how small.
Moments so bereft of logic
that no other explanation is left
beyond them being
inherently
magic.

Focus so ferociously on the color of the leaves
each spring
and the wet uneven bumps in the corner of
your dog’s crescent nostrils
that you lose track
of all the reasons you never liked to spend time
at home in the first place.

Lose sleep if you must.
Stare at a person
in raw barren awe
at the fact any universe,
nonetheless our
universe,
could ever
create them.

Craft
hone
divine
a shred of hope
on which to cling
until there are no stars left above.
Backfilling gaps left by grey days
with good intentions
and proving to your corner of existence
that forever
can
and will never
fall silent.

Assure people they aren’t alone
and are deserving
of being loved
harder than they know how to accept,
until gravity
seems to shift,
grant them freedom in flight
to soar backwards through
all their dark winters
and bring back something sacred,
flickering in folded beauty
like glass taffy
drawn from moving water.
Paco Lypps Aug 2020
I'm quitting my Job
Show the Boom it can be done
Sacrifice myself
Before I'd let them touch my Sun
Living fore ones progeny
Is unsung as evolution
Middle age confusion
After all naught the solution
Leading to regression
Quantitative are infusions
Curing our depression
Backfilling such sought delusion
Thousand cuts
Keynesian contusions
In a rut
Cohesion our fusion

— The End —