Today Sorrow and I took a short stroll. Pulled along like a puckered thread, it tugged me to the quieter, more innocuous spaces of my deepest revery.
Today we share the moon, Mum.
Ivory as the speckled china holding my cup of liquid comfort; as ivory as your soft woollen jumper that hangs heavily over my shoulders - I’m enmeshed and warming; and it’s the closest I can get to a hug from you.
The air is always bitter by November, and today is your birthday.
There’s no rolling tears to wipe the slate clean,
just the rolling thunder of my quiet, patient grief.
My stoicism now seems to stand someplace between steel and air;
and I guess, sometimes, I just can’t allow myself to “go there”.
So all I do, is I lean into the menial small details of this silent day.
I make space to remember you, as I bat my usual distractions away.
I gaze at the ivory bristles, the feathered plants that sit atop my empty table,
and I try align myself as closely as I can to you in that photograph...
To where you stood, full moon in the pinch of your fingertips,
surrounded by the feathered barley, wearing our woolen ivory.
And it’s here I desperately attempt to wedge myself into your moment;
to make it match with my own, somehow.
But no rolling tears, just the patience of love; passing like charging horses,
curling and hanging like a white curtain of clouds, folding over a forlorn sky.
Why look to grey, when I could tug at any hint of warmth?
The off-white is one step closer to the barley-corn that surrounded you that mid-summers night.
To the full moon we could call ours tonight, so beautifully bright.
I may be braced for winter, but I know, one day, it’ll be alright.
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