Next door cultivates perfection – gardens pert with flowery blooms like vibrant little soldiers heeding the command of love’s labour, shimmering with prideful confidence
My garden is overgrown vines, chaos’ shameful exhibition, bemoans the futility of planting, knows there will be no follow through, betrays the absence of love’s toil.
Life has schooled detachment lessons in loss counsel defensiveness – better to guard hope than plant it…
How can next door be so reckless; do they not know this all for naught?
(This a rewrite of former poem also titled Next Door. Image my own.)
Did you know that life would come to this? Flattened memories pressed between wax the essence of our efforts forgotten, the dreams, so carefully construed, lost.
You leaned toward the conventional, and I was ever the sentimentalist, and yet we ended up in the same place – shadow selves standing at the banks of our dishevelled lives…
Survivors, nonetheless, tokens of a a past riddled with so many lies, so much heartbreak…
We are ghost sisters haunted, hunting, unable to step away –
Drawn in, pulling apart – all that remains.
(Family Portrait first appeared here February, 2019. Edited here. Image my own)
Calm, the morning air, mind lost in reflection, mirror-still waters
Raise my eyes skyward, pray for release, an end to Mother’s suffering.
Nothing. Death has its own rhythm – emotions mud.
(I wrote this poem a year ago, when my Mother was in and out of hospital with heart failure and pneumonia. Now, a year later, she continues to struggle. “We live too long,” she says. “Pray for my release.” Photo: Mom at 94, courtesy of my son.)