What is left of us, of all that was when old gods
Topped the charts and it was a new adventure?
Not much, I think, in those taped-up boxes now locked in storage,
Fragments of lives past kept as sometime prompts for the memory,
Or props for a wine-sodden conversation on a drifting evening.
A picture of us in the church meadow, smiling despite the grey skies,
Bathed in the joyful love of friends and family.
You, in grey scale, outside the Duomo,
A faraway sadness in your eyes that now says you already knew.
Crystal and silver, still boxed, never used, or used once?
High days and holidays, we thought,
Like our parents and grandparents before us.
Were the mugs ours, bought in a Bavarian village
On the last day of a holiday, when I was young and had dreams,
From the hotelier who hung himself years later?
Or did I buy them some other time, with another ghost?
I forget.
The piece of paper, raggedly reprinted, with confirmation
In a nondescript font that we no longer are.
And the painting your sister did, haunting with its childish strokes,
Trying to capture with love that happy moment abroad forever,
To keep us smiling, before we all went mad?
9th March 2023
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Fragments And Reflections
PoetryPoems looking at everything and anything not in my other collections. Here you'll find life and time, wild oceans and lonely coast paths, busy streets and empty hotel rooms, wild concerts and late night writing. All just fragments and reflections, l...
