Remembrance

The Heart's Discourse

Yours is its cup, brimming with carnation, in the radiance of color —
how often your eyes gleamed, alighting upon it, content:
in the riot of crimson or in the calm of white!
And how often you breathed it in, and bloodied its cheeks with kissing!

★

"Into God's keeping, Mother"...
I send the words up, burning,
bent over a marble slab,
my gaze nailed fast upon something
— behind the earth — beloved — that I meet every year,
beneath the green cypress,

In my reverence, and the nakedness of my soul,
and from my eyes the heart takes wing,
reviving tender remembrances,
a rover of horizons, asking and insisting...
and in its turning back, surrender and helplessness..

★

Yours today is all of it, the turning of my thought —
and my feelings, what has come over them? They soften and grow fine,
and in the blaze of tears they melt,
and from my head the near and the far are erased,
and behold, existence... is you!
And without you I see myself, in the abjection of orphanhood, struck dumb —
is this a prayer unfinished... or unbelief?!