grinninfoole

Quiet and still, still you lie

In your bespoke coffin

Laid out with your head on a little pillow

Just as my mother left you.

How long have you lain

In the dark

Alone 

In the dark

While the world turned on?

When did my mother last embrace you?

Hold you close and whisper 

“There there, my sweet one”?

How often were you a blessed memory to her?

How long was it since the miracle

Of human empathy

Graced you with a semblance of a living spirit?

It didn’t matter to you, since there is no you

Only matter

Cloth and plastic and ceramic

Shaped by but not shaping

Thought.

I see your tiny shape in a faded brown box

And I weep for the love my mother lavished on you

Gone now, with her, these two years already, 

And miss the Archimedean firmament

She gave me for half a century.

I appreciated it, appreciated her, every moment of my life in that time, 

and yet I knew not what I had, 

as fish do not comprehend the sea.

Like a little boat left behind by the shores of the Chad and the Aral

I am left desolate by her dissolution.

You mean nothing to me, but I am heartbroken to let you go, 

as I let her go.

Her love was real, even if you were not,

And the shapes of the past blow away in the wind.