Tag: shrine

“You fling it open for the first time but I’m gone” M. Kahf ~ Wall

There's flowers and a makeshift shrine.
Not meant for holiness or mere mawkish
memories ignited by tealights.
A kind of covenant though, promises
in this world and the next,
still kept. From your corner there

a few mementos, even the small beachcombed stone 
buddha like, as in Japan. Monochromed
and framed, you gazed lastly at my camera
and now those eyes consider 
strange surrounds, rooms unvisited.
The silence is profound, familiar as convent hush
without shared music or improvised duets.

II
Another Christmas unpacked, and buried
under bric-à-brac and baubles, a luxury, sliding box.
Some sympathy messages laid within, rubber-banded
half-perished now. And pretty cards with precious words
in familiar hand, in fading ink
as poem or passion, intimate as us. 

I'd thought to keep you bundled there forever
but only stale air rose at the opening
and sentiment, fruitless as dust in cupped hands.
Objects cannot shore against time past. 

Our paths diverged. 
So long I've stood and watched
your back. I'll say it again:
"It's time to make my move".

The epigraph of Kahf is one from my Poetics prompt whereby I give a choice of poetry endings to set our own poems in motion: “Beginning at the End”