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I Smile In The Face Of Death

As I wake up flat on my back

in an unfamiliar bed,

surrounded by hazy faces

and teary eyes,

and wobbly smiles,

I find that I cannot

for the life of me

remember who and why

they are here for this old guy.

 

A figure clad in black, too,

stands right there at the door.

I don't know why they won't come in

or why they're being ignored.

Perhaps, I think,

they...

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🌷(8) 

death   grief   passing   comfort

ENDINGS

A series of 11 short poems

 

End of a Galaxy

 

A blink

In the silent depth of night

 

 

As the last leaf of the beech tree

As the silent tear of my love

 

 

 

End of Harmony

 

I see her dancing on the sands

 

I see her                                     as she sees me

and in that moment

sand, sea, sun, surf

vanish in the vortex

until

...

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🌷(2) 

communion   companionship   death   dreams   endings   illness   life   love   passing   sickness   talk

When...

When I have gone

what waits this room

with its vacuum

                where I sat?

 

Does

my chair sits sightless

musing at my absence

midst space bereft

                   my music play on?

 

After I have left

ask my empty bed

all sheeted void

                about my dreams

 

Does

my mattress dent

minding my long night wraiths

maintain my ...

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🌷(3) 

death   ghosts   home   house   memories   passing   shadows

Beyond Death

I find that I must live in a world

Where, between that desperate dusk and a new dawn,

And between many a dawn and its dusk,

The only reality lies in love.

 

To be in love in that first dawn

And in the dusk, was to feel the sun

Warm our very passion every minute of every hour,

Reality lay only in the other.

And beyond that dreadful dusk, nothing

but dawns and dusk and ...

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🌷(1) 

Love   life   death   passing   dawn   dusk

On leaving a hospital room

The sky in front of me is pink, as I drive homeβ€š

there will be a frost tonight.

Beneath it the brackened hills lie pinkly rust

And trees stand starkly laced in contrast

I see every distant twig defined, sharp against the pearlescent sky.

 

Not much later, I sit over tea and look west

to where the sky is left creamily gold.

Above, the darkling blue is split by a fading pink ...

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death   passing   hospitals   memories   introspection

Unmarked By Their Passing

I tell you there’s no ending, no straightening the straights,

and the twists and turns of life will remain unending.

 

Where do those paths go, via many trees bowed by breeze,

and thorny bushes with fresh and old blood specks to show.

 

Some are freeted by time, just lumbering and slumbering,

as stuttering takes them on to old, past their posturing prime.

 

Bored by ster...

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Age   Atoms   death   Passing   Remaining

Mortality

I see him at my window tonight.
The moon, full and bright
Casts his dark shadow onto an icy wall.
A familiar silhouette, unmistakable,
Pressed against the pane.
The cold melts his breath into feathery diamonds
Running in thin veins down the thick glass.
His face, hidden and veiled in black
Glances my way and nods;
I nod back
Acceptingly. Suddenly,
The glass no longer divid...

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poem   passing   fear   lost   loss   humanity   mortality   Death   poetry   reaper

The Voice of a Quill, Now Silent



I am but the mottled bark
of a tree once firmly rooted,
peeled from its stately trunk

and within my hollow carapace
echoes an inert drumbeat
that keeps the cadence for
a march of ornate trappings

soon and sooner still, one day
this crepuscular orphelin song
resonant in its languid longing
shall surge with the rising tide

the sound of its condescencion
as i...

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heritage   legacy   farewell   poet   passing   death   deceased   demise   forgotten

PASSING BY

Passing by, you held my eye,

Now hours later I still sigh.

 

Instead of making sure we met

I'm made to live with this regret.

 

How many times on this old Earth

Is love condemned to this still-birth?

 

Love's own strangers passing by,

Left to wonder - left to sigh.

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passing   Love

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