A seed grew into
the spirit of a country
nurtured on the wall between
two lands
perhaps the reincarnation of a Roman guard?
Or a stonemason who worked on the Emperor Hadrian’s wall,
dreaming of his Apuane home
where his wife and children farm Tuscan soil,
nurturing their little vineyard of hope until the return of their patriarch.
The return…
Does anything cut from this world return?
Some things remain alive in memory.
Their presence felt, like the itch of a severed limb,
the soothing voice of your mother’s spirit in the song of a morning lark.
Yet, the void is real.
There is no filling it.
Where there was something true, something distinct and beloved,
there is now only air and occasional blue sky, chasing or fleeing the darkness.
“Everything is pointless.”
Shouted something inside someone with a chainsaw and a grudge.
But the roots and the stone and the grassy fen deny this cleft
