Ashes and Dead Coals

Ashes and Dead Coals

Hope is a string of pearls, hurled onto the floor,
torn between the desperation and the craw.
Measured days of heartache,
spoonfuls of opium scented flowers,
strewn in careless abandon on bloody tiles,
fake smiles, tossed to lions;
Strangeness, stumbling between the shards,
nothing left inside the hearth,
but ashes and dead coals.

How do we string those pearls together again?
When all the threads are broken,
how does the heart find the courage to endure?

In the garden of love there are two pools,
one of joy, the other of sorrow,
one past, one, tomorrow.
Libations in the lamentations of betrayal,
The arrows dipped, slipped into the wound.
To bathe in cool streams of past regret,
dreams, turned in upon themselves.
From root to seed, that ancient tree still bleeds.

Finding the time to breathe again,
The wailing edge of sorrow,
a bough without a song.
Deep ray, the dawn comes,
and with her, bright lark,
resplendently reborn from out the dark,
settles upon your heart, with joy, once more.

Strings of pearls threaded through ancient eyes,
matriculating in the school where love never dies.

© Richard Michael Parker 2017

Grief

-Grief-

It is called mourning. Grief that comes from out the loss, intimate loss, and though we seek to deflect it, deny, or in anger, fail to accept it, still, in the end, it is loss, it is love. A love that demands the truth of our sincerity, a sincerity in the grace of that loss.

Those deep bonds of love, the intimate vulnerability of the heart, where trust is an absolute, leave us open to the truth of the deepest sorrow, just as they have allowed for the greatest joy. They gnaw upon the marrow, as easily as the ecstasy they employ.

When we lose those we have loved, the depths they have dug into the fathomless oceans of our heart, swallows us, until we too, crushed in the darkness of that infinite blue... become those depths.

But this is not a sign of failure or weakness, abnormality or affliction, rather, it lends it's colours to the truth of the love we have shared, the trust and the care, the infinite womb in the oceans of our mutual tenderness.

How can one who has ever lost and loved ever come to a place of forgiveness, acceptance, or the dawn of renewed hope once more, except through the door that leads through the dark night of the soul? One who has lost, in love, and grieved not, loved not.

Grief is a room where all fear to follow, for it is dark and hollow, holding nothing but the sea's that we swallow; still, it is a room with two doors.

On the outside of one, written in large dark script, is the word, 'Loss'. On the inside of the other, written in equally dark script, is the word, 'Hope'. Only, In that darkened place, the sanctum in the sorrow of that infinite space, it is hard to read the writing, without a light.

© Richard Michael Parker 2017

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Spring Cleaning

-Spring Cleaning-

They were sweet and torrential!... The fitful sleep of a carousel that whirls after long years of disuse; cobwebs swept from out darkened corners, the dust brushed and removed. From time to time I stop and pick up some fine bone china ornament or a decorative figurine, a memory of all that has been, and fly, but for a moment, into some long lost forgotten sky. Then all at once your suns deep ray shines it's ceaseless way into the recesses of my mind, and I am home again, the dust swept away in an instant as I open the window from whence you have shone your loving balm upon my soul. Spring cleaning is such a moment of bittersweet revelry, and though the songs of distant days echo their sweet tunes in fragrant hallways, half lit stairwells, nothing will quell the turning of the season, and the warm thaw of winters cool heart. I close my eyes and walk into your light, your warm fingers stroke these threads with imperceptible delicacy, a new day has dawned, and warmer suns beckon me on.

© Richard Michael Parker 2017