After one sadness comes another in its place,
a different-but-the-same sadness,
a sadness like a mound of spectacles and shoes,
that was once the promise of a borrowed dollar.
Sadness, and its dirty grey rainbow,
the attending flies of introspection,
a perpetual falling down of things
beyond our purview or administration.
I call sadness the troll, back-bender,
poor-provider, hole-of-the-soul,
kitten-in-a-blizzard, bird-on-the-road.
A constant companion, sadness is
the little nabob who never was.
I've made a church for it
out of these two hands
so we may hang our heads and low
at the black sun in my heart.
I'm put in mind of a Christmas long ago,
of a lover lost in a time storm.
I see myself reaching for the morning star,
unaccepting of the bewildering distances.
Sadness is a doll found down a well,
a letter pinned to the back of a drawer,
the hunger pangs of a million children.
It mopes under the willows.
Sadness coaxes, coerces, cajoles.
At its kernel is the art of atonement.
A babe in the woods or puzzlement,
I think sadness may be music among sorrows.
It's a wolf looking at a mirror
and not liking what it sees therein;
the onrushing gales of its extinction.
Comments