Stephe Watson Poet Free verse

Notes About The Poem

(For Steve for Scooter.  For Alice, for Hong.)

Tender Days

Guilt is immortal

Grief can live only in the tender hours,
in the sweet bittersweet tender days -
the days who number some number
unknown to all, felt by each...

If guilt makes its home where
seeds of grief are sown by circumstance,
watered by the downpour tears of the broken,
lit by shadow at the feet of those missing the missing,

   will grief ever come to fruit?
       No.

If guilt must grow.
(And only if.)
    Let it be put off.

A hole in the canopy
letting light find the darkened forest floor.
   There where rot rises and decay undoes all doing.
   Here in the dappled understory each story comes to rest (at best.)
   Here in the dappled understory where the rich soil flowers only in mushroom.
This is the onlywhere where grief can grow.
Grief takes root, takes hold, takes it torn form in only the brief.

Guilt is the mind displacing the work that each heart must do.
The brief needs of grief arise where and when the head might, of habit, of its own twisted comfort, displace the heartneeds with mindwants and revel in guilt.

Grief needs.
This.
Grief needs.
You.
Grief needs.
Now.

Will we not have Grief have its time, in its time?
It’s place, in its place?


In the light of the dark?



-ShhDragon

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