Saudade
When everythings gone,
whisked away, transmuted
to other metamorphic relativities,
the fleshy after-taste is bittersweet
in mind and memory.
How the was and has beens
take richer flavour like old wine,
brooding with the melancholy fruit
and accepting the poignant loss
of melding and dissolution.
Even beyond sulky resignation,
the resentful ache and echo of ago
is dispelled by the diaspora of time
to pure longing, tender and lonely.
Finding the self both softly sweet,
and mournful with the dignity of discovering
how small and separate we are, each one
- transient, ephemeral.
Translucent blobs of conscious jell
as tadpoles, sperm and microbes,
flail around, endangered,
raw & bare, without skin or armour
yet, on some mighty, inexpressible mission, godsped.
The watercolour hues of sadness
imbue the emotive soul
with a hankering relinquishment
of sketchy absences:
ghosty faces, feelings, presences
percolating through everyday, place
and recollection.
The hiraeth between here and there
likewise,
embodying the geographic ache
for home.
The innate lunge to climb back
to safety of the womb, past states;
hang in and on to familial shadows
engraved in the psyche and genes.
The stones of sorrow,
makers of peace.
Aug