Enfolding the Heart of Loss
A poem about shared suffering and the wholeness of compassion
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night wondering if it was all a dream But I know, only reality taste this bitter.
The folds of the blanket remind me of those clouds at the picnic, when we watched the swans drift across the pond following evolutionary’s blind algorithm, wondering if that, too, is love.
And did you also question, who dropped the first stone, in our sinusoidal love story? Collapsing it all, into a single genus-one manifold of sin and virtue.
In the curves of your lips time runs down, these jagged years. And yet in a creaking wooden chair, the ghost of my uncle sits taking away, love and clarity betting my soul, at a table with the devil — and I roam now, lost in the city of mirrors.
I fear not death nor infinity nor the null of divinity, but never existing at all. I fear being a shadow of an empty afterthought in the tired eye of Eath’s magnetic soul.
I fear the maze, you know the one, because we stand there now, in the eternal center a place without boundaries or borders a rotating cathedral circle as we arrive again, at our emulated blasphemous choices.
Is all our pain, enfolded from the suffering of the world? Like a leaf inside a seed yet grown? In a cell before the baptism before the quiet house becomes too loud, with regret.
Have we grown death from the fertile lands of the heart? In fear of failure, we decree the apocalypse upon the future? to a species weeping the will o’ wisp, banshee seeping and screaming, into the soil, of our graveyard tales I know not, the moon’s final cycle.
Listen… Listen… to the enfolding of reality, implicate being of one and dream my love O! dream of your escape in wild reddened poppy fields to sleep to hope to feel not a thing.
© Bradley J Nordell 2020
If you enjoyed this poem, you might also like to read this short story:






