Au Revoir Genieve - Miss G - Woollery

For a day, for a week, for a month you will be remembered Those who knew you well Family will always recall that you have left a void in them The thoughtful friend for a year May think and shed a tear Memories are expendable like everything in time Sun rise and sunset Night comes and day goes And day after day and day again changing to night We seem to come on a whim of time And in the coming and going of days we are gone Those who cry long or not at all are the same They have a metacognition of death How shall I describe what we had And what forever remains because I write this page Because I well intend The girl from Hanover who became woman amongst us Shall not go as trivial as mere dust We read you lady like a book that made us think Better of ourselves, because you treated us better than ourselves So I shall not just close you and put you on a shelf As if you were mere display I wanted a postlude since meeting you again I wanted to more than dream of youth Tattered at the edge, bone ragged too, jagged in the soul To mend, to shape, to embroider with love again You and I mentoring tomorrow all day long yesterday And yesterday in the hot sun we met unmelted in purpose And you brought me brimming with excitement And we at the root of tree fertilized by the shade Back and forth, back forth swung on memories And I felt our friendship endured good, and that we are old Dreamers in a different world with new priorities Less eternal than before, indeed without eternity In the heart man nothing great comes of mortality We tongue sifted love and hate in one moment As if prophetic that time is the climax of maliice and discontent. Five weeks from the day we embraced again you died For you it came in five days The discovery of cancer, the surgery, the demise There was no farewell just the sudden emptiness The impotence of desire, the shrivelling power of pain We shall not collaborate in moulding the young again Is this how love wounds us in the plight of the irrevokable separation? I want these words to be your memory When the flowers are faded from your grave I want you to have a legacy as a servant And a reward as a queen I place my love gently beside you And cause this poem to mark the spot Where you touched our lives Where history will find you ravaged by the sorrow of years Making rainbow for us out of your tears Au revoir teacher, woman, sister, model wife, mother, friend Those who cry are crazy if think this is the end You are too great for that.