Tag: sorrow

Sibling Haiku

Four brothers at their last reunion

No way we could know
at this playful reunion,
it would be our last.

(2015)

Notes:  While there may be a later photo of my brothers and I all together, I do not know of it.  Less than four years after this shot, Bill (third from the bottom) would perish in a scuba diving accident in San Diego bay.

John (second from the bottom) was an electrician who would touch the wrong wire in a Colorado coal mine many years later.

Larry (at the bottom) would die after a stroke in 2010.

I’m the last leaf on the tree.

Sonnet Upon Seeing a Photograph

Doing what brides' mothers always do

Please Tell Me

Tell me the photograph I lately spied
While idly searching round the internet,
One of a greying woman and a bride,
A common scene of longing and regret,

She’s fussing with the buttons and the dress,
Just doing what brides’ mothers often do
To stall the creeping sense of uselessness …
Please tell me that this woman isn’t you.

Her eyes are heavy-lidded widow’s eyes,
Not wide and worshipful how I recall.
Her weary face with sorrow etched likewise,
Not fresh and freckled tempting me to fall.
Her lips so tightly clenched that I surmise
These can’t be lips that once held me in thrall.

Notes:  Not that I need any more reminders, but time is moving on.  I — and those I have known and loved and lost — are getting older.  And life is not always kind.

Robert Frost said, “Nothing gold can stay.”

Robert Herrick said, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins said, “It is the blight man was born for.”

I say … well, you can read the poem …

©Bobby Ball 2018 (written 2018)