Roland Gurney
Elegy for Autumn
This season soaks its blood into our bones.
Through underpasses of scrawled walls and scribbled skies
I marvel at minutiae of existences, concrete-cracking grasses
Bunched in green springs. The graveyard’s unsettling stones
Brush memories into polished cancers white as snows
Emphasizing uniqueness in each prospective flake.
Fresh coffee scalds stripped lips, wreathed in your shadows
Staring stark as absences when you turn and wake,
Rising from nocturnal pains and wounds. I gave you golden flowers
Reflecting the starry showers of your harvest hair
Held in such natural grace. Now huge-headed hydrangeas
Reminisce of the Isle of Wight’s first journeying together
As orange-roofed houses recall pre-war Yugoslavia,
A country torn apart like a ripped whore
Into fragmented non-existence. The silence
Splashes with invisible rains like pebbles braining the sea
Into the slimy surface of a slaughterhouse.
The red-eyed hamster sleeps in its caged contentments,
Its fur the colour of grain. Your nature is more of a dormouse
Hungry for hibernation in this tormented world.
A breeze bright as first-light shivers across skinned flesh.
The drained fountain scatters its waste of emptiness.
Lilies and roses are gone like kidnapped children to their deaths.
Such sadnesses swamp feelings with convulsive breaths.
I struggle to catch these shapes in my networked mesh,
Remembering only that initial torrential tenderness.
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