Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

These empty spaces
Quiver, pulse, inside of me
Composed of God-knows-what:
Memory, hope, desire?
Lacking in originality
these empty rooms,
these lingering spaces,
In empty railways stations
Smell the  smoky-smell of coal and steam
Now long gone in this anonymous dream..
I'm caught up in an evening’s desultoriness.
I've seen my 5 children leave home
We have their brother's ashes.  
I see a girl’s slight distress as she leaves the empty nest.
Such absences: father, brother, son
Mingle with the spine-tingling haunting of my imagination,
That is a prelude to a waking death:
Echoes and shadows of those who walked before. 
Sitting, upon the floor of  an A&E trauma room
Where  their isolated cry punctures the sky,
Disturbs the hush of illness.
The ever present caw-caw-cawing of the brazen crows
Across the road, in another century,
When the heated glow of household fires welcomed
Tired soldiers home to share the beds of strangers

And still the cries bounce from wall-to-wall
Echoing, in these empty rooms, that fatal Fall .