From the Heart
This sorrow knows no loss.
Decades mean nothing
when it wells at the light
in your eyes, your image
a reminder of all we share,
my face more like yours
with each passing year.
My own eyes could be yours,
but moist now with memories,
my smile just as tentative,
until it beams with laughter.
When I smile. But for now
I think of your heart. Would I
give you mine instead, spare you
the pain you knew, only to give you
the pain I feel at this moment?
The prompt for NaPoWriMo.net Day 18 is to write an elegy, with the abstraction of sadness portrayed through physical details. Grief is not something that weighs on my mind every day, but memories such as this are just as hard to write about as they would have been twenty-five years ago.
rivrvlogr 
I understand, Ken. I wrote about my father, too.
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Thank you, Merril. ❤
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❤
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My eyes are suddenly moist, reading your evocative poem. Remembering, Missing.
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Thank you.
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I was thinking of both my parents today. A vacancy that is always there. I can especially identify with seeing them in the mirror when you look at yourself. (K)
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Thoughts of mine never go away.
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Closing question is powerful. Different kinds of pain, suffering.
I resonate with looking more and more like the parent – and now I understand what Mother meant when she said her feet hurt all the time.
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Thank you, Jazz. My father died at 60, so I’ve already passed him in years, and sometimes I wonder, “What if I could give him just those six more years?” Of course, the loss would be great at any age. My mother was gone at 74 – still young – but I think of her 15 years without my father. Grief offers too many alternatives for my taste.
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This one brought a lump in my throat. I lost mine when I was sixteen and the ache never goes.
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And it shouldn’t.
Thank you.
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isn’t it a shock, sometimes, to pass a mirror and see your father staring back? it is to me ~
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It’s definitely one I didn’t see coming.
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This one struck close, Ken. Thanks for sharing!
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Thank you, Bob.
Sometimes the easiest ones to write about are the hardest.
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So true, Ken!
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