Pittsburgh, Christmas 1971
I waited, knowing the festivities
Would choke the flow of transatlantic calls,
Delays which brought their own blank auguries,
A prelude to the saddest of farewells.
“Ah… yes…”, my brother said, quite languidly,
Languor that looked for comfort in delay.
But what he added lacked necessity,
The link was cut and youth had gone astray.
She died within a distant older place
I’d left behind with callow eagerness,
Yet unrestrained by any false embrace,
Encouraged, taught, with chances of success.
She wrote, I write, but here’s the difference
No letters, now, to foil my ignorance.
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7 comments:
No witty, sardonic observation here, as we have come to expect from your poems. Rather a deeply felt experience of loss, concentrated and powerfully expressed in a few words. For a moment, I forget that it is a sonnet, surely an indication that it works as a poem.
As Plutarch said. Writing in verse seems to distill all to a main emotion, which you have done well, BB.
Joe and Marja-Leena have said all that matters here, BB.
What you have written - so movingly, so eloquently, so viscerally - will stay with me long after you move on to other subjects.
Martha
An intense reduction, honest and moving.
It's the season for retrospection, perhaps.
Can't blame these teardrops in my blue eyes after experiencing your sonnet on overtiredness. Oh, BB.
Others have said it before me.
Thanks all. An odd feeling - as if you were her audience rather than mine.
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