Category: life

Next Door

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.)

Family Portrait

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)

Premonition

A mother wakes, moments
before her baby’s cry, or
reaches with loving arms
just as her toddler stumbles

Call it instinct, or premonition

A sister calls in timely fashion,
was feeling a little concerned,
or arrives with tea just when
a break is exactly what’s needed

Call it instinct, or premontion

A daughter rushes to
her mother’s side, senses
the unanswered calls
are more than busyness

Call it instinct, or premonition

Then, why, when he cheated –
flaunted his courtships
with self-righteous bravado –
did I miss all the signs?

Denial negates instinct,
negates premonition.

(Premonition first appeared here February, 2018. Image my own)