beauty & sadness

beauty & sadness
november 2021, for M.                              

Tablet with Linear A script, photo taken at Archaeological Museum of Chania, Crete; attributed to author: By Ursus – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22307292

there should be
a prize at
the end

they found your
body after what
we knew as you
had already
left it in
your place,
a cup on
the bench,
a cupboard
door standing
open?, in my
knowing
so little of it,
your life like the find
a shepherd boy made
on hillside ground
twisted and dry
as olive trunks,
a figure on a
broken frieze,
painted large with
curls, eye and gesture,

even they

even they
9 october, 2014

With acknowledgements to the Guardian.com for use of this image, credited to Barbara Walton/EPA

he* who had looked
into the heart of the
matter of matter
and its cloud-like
changes
who saw clear the
chain of lives dangling
through time told us
even the gods* pass

fading out across
the sky over thousands
and thousands of years
the gods whose being
was once bright and
impenetrable as an
evening star growing
its light into darkness
whose pleasures and amorous
grasps almost wore away
the face of time itself,

day was born

day was born
november 2013

The Estuary Man by KK, when the estuary came ashore

the riches
were not
hard metal
nor cloth
spun of
moonlight
clasped with
rubies
such riches
were never
in my grasp
in place
there were
there are
skies of touch
along the body
the tokens of
the dear ones
a photo of a
face so much