Eternal Verities

The window faces south to a cluttered valley
and rises to tile-red rooftops, a cemetery
beyond, cherry-blossomed in Spring, a haven
of sorts for the dead and lonely. Love engraven

in weathered words on through-stones of posterity,
our final hopeless acts, biographies of fidelity,
shrines to the sacrifice of life: all the years spent
in work and worry, the hideous hope and intent

to do right, to provide and protect. Eventually
their bones crumbled into dust unintentionally
in inevitable surrender to the outworn decree
the ancients left so generously to you and me.

I’m now at ease walking among eternal verities
without any question, in comfortable secularity.
Why miss a speck of dust? Illusions of memories
and unrequited desire no longer enough for me

as none obstruct the pitiless orbit of grief. Reliable
as the moon, it rises and falls in an undeniable,
persistent confirmation of all that it is to survive,
a devoted companion if you manage to stay alive.

Among the rooftops a pair of herring gulls shape
their nest. Mated for life, driven to eat and create
in perpetuity for thirty million years, or the jackdaw
on the fence, casting its blue-eyed gaze towards

the window. None conceive this superfluousness,
let alone give a damn. You live, you eat, you obsess,
you procreate if you can, you suffer and soon die.
So what this mass of breath expelled in asking why?

Curtains drawn, whisky poured, the graveyard can
wait. More discernment, more determination, and
more dialogue to find and cling onto. A new-born
to a fingertip, a prisoner to light, a leaf in a storm.