Christopher Haywood Poet Free verse

Notes About The Poem

The collapse of the house leaves hidden words buried forever.

Buried Forever

The table carries a round pale mark
where a coffee mug sat long ago,
and right beside it, flat and still,
the letter lies in the shadows' slow
and steady crawl across the pine.

Twenty winters have turned the page,
fading the ink of the handwritten name
to a shade like tea or dry oak leaf.
Nobody touches it; no one came
to break the seal or turn it over.

It sits there while the floorboards creak,
while light fades out on the kitchen floor,
holding a voice that never spoke,
a sentence left at a heavy door.

Did it carry an apology?
A sudden shift in a life's design?
Or just the quiet, ordinary words
of someone running out of time?

Now it’s as much a part of the wood
as the rings inside or the varnish wear—
a piece of news that arrived too late,
or arrived to a house with no one there.

And now the rafters groan and break,
as the tired walls fold inward slowly,
burying timber in dust under shade
where only creeping ivy grows;
unopened still, beneath the fall,
the message sleeps forevermore.

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