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Poetic Leanings

The light of a whole life

“The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of
the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand
eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life
dies,
When love is done. ”

Francis William Bourdillon

The light of a whole life lays on a row of bounded paper, paper bound to preserve the written word for posterity.

Ye rows upon rows of bounded word
did all call me
blithely, first
entreating, last.
Supposing me to be of you
me, who wished
and wanted
and wistfully did pray
for that whole life too.

Yonder, another did call
my prose,
too cumbersome,
my poetry,
wasted
demanding, instead,
terseness,
that I fail to reach.
So, I tumbled,
landing, beneath a thumb.

In that shade,
of the whole life I did not cease to think.
And, cloaked,
the words did flow.
Hope and joy,
unhindered, coursing through each one.

But in an unforgiving minute,
an unguarded instant,
the pen is treacherously snatched away,
a darkening aspersion is cast upon all writ
and where the unwearied ways of words did flow,
do tears now fall unbid.

Shaken and harried the pages are emptied,
A lexis of love now never to be read,
Never to be heard,
Never to be affirmed.
yet, etching itself deep within me,
while all look upon
empty pages
and wonder.

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