Wednesday 9 May 2012

I Saw You - a poem


I Saw You

I saw you walk in and it was clear from your demeanour and your slow and hesitant steps that you were scared out of your wits, cut down, half dead by the worry,

Anxiety bubbling away in your tired head,

Locked down with weary tears,

Too afraid to dare to believe.

But in you stepped, stooped,

Your strong frame bowed low and weak,

Clamped shut by emotions too hurried and harried,

Your steps were heavy, burdened with a dread,

And denial,

An acceptance and a revelation,

You were once,

But not now, hopeful and built for hard work,

Capable, reliable and formidable in physical ways,

But the lens of coloured glass, reflects a different side today,

Mottled by colours in a different way,

Hewn in daubs of red and yellow,

Casting a shadow,

In this unfamiliar scene,

Of some of life’s grand events,

Those memories spent and wrenched, from a cold heart,

Made colder,

Not from madness and alcohol,

But an impassable wall of wailing,

That shapes, this encounter,

In this supposed sanctuary of anointing and redemption.

Your gruff voice, barely a mutter, was a redacted gesture,

Reduced to a flutter of air,

Passing through lips, too tense,

To breathe deeply of the joys and pleasures to be found.

Resolute,

And majestic,

Your grit determination to make your once a year pilgrimage,

To cast your heavily held stone,

And to lay that burden down momentarily,

Or more accurately,

Let speak in your inner being those words you never wanted to hear,

Those syllables that have shaped existence and life in ways, never before imagined,

Words that can never be spoken, and must never be spoken,

And should never be spoken, and should never have been spoken.

Condemn to the history books the oral passing of every dialogue on the matter,

Every muttering by another white coat.

Every wasted breath trying to articulate through nothing more than intellectual grunts and groans,

Some absurdist reality, a Dadaist deception, that cuts to the heart.

And channels within, a wall of shadows, too high to climb,

Too strong to fell,

Too impenetrable to pass through.

And like history’s rusted pages you move.

A spectre filled with air, but not life.

Your steps echoed down that wide corridor,

And I saw you.

You were seen.

Maybe not all of you.

But enough.

To begin.