An Almost Word...

                                                                        
                                                           

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Buzzing, flitting--

Out of reach.

Evading defiantly:

A drunken gnat of memory.

Tantalizing with maybe,

Could be, almost…

Sleep descends,

Eyes heavy in a curtain of dark.

Hidden letters a-b-c stretch out,

Swatting the inebriated midge.

The almost-name, almost-word

Rises from the hazy smoke

Of buried, cluttered

Memory

I wrote this in 2013, back before the senior citizen years began.

This means so much to me now that I have reached this age and my brain taunts me all the time. Damn it. 

Saddest stones of all

 

San Marcos, CA cemetery 
Once a quiet country place

Now, surrounded by streets and noise,.

Beneath gnarled olive trees

Three stones.

Old stones—

1920s old.

“Baby” carved in the first stone
.

Below it, “Baby” in the second stone.

At the bottom of the line of three,

“Baby”

Old stones—

Lonely stones.

Forgotten stones.

 

After one Veteran's Day service, I took roses picked from bushes at my house over to a small cemetery in our community. There were so many gravesites that ranged from Civil War through WW1, old gravestones. Hidden among those were these small insignificant ones. There must have been so much pain from these deaths that those precious babies were given their own place in history. God bless them and their parents.

 

The Pilgrim Soul

  

When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.