Hallowed Ground

❖

There was a twinkling in her eye
A sparkle discontinued.
A hearth, a home, a compromise,
A sober thought to chill you,
Will I be just like her
Weak and disarrayed, dying some day?
Fighting to breathe and say...

There was once a child sat here, 
Eager to be older.
Laughter lines came through the years,
But laughter pines without use.
Don't let it ever get difficult to smile,
I'm smiling now,
You just can't see, that's all.

        -----------

All the grown-ups tell me to be quiet
They say she's close to passing on
But I oughtn't to feel sad,
'Cos she's going to meet grandad.
Will she leave by the front door?
She is free, I am her, she is me.

Does he understand as I do,
We're getting closer by the hour.
  Where's the priest and his last rites,
  Wonder how I will sleep nights
With only soul, no flesh or bone.
Let me be, I am him, he is me.

Sleepwalks down the stairs a sheet wrapped round him
As he enters in her silent room,
  Where she sits up in horror,
  As the ghost of tomorrow
She'll never last throughout the night.
Headstone cold, read she's old, she died of fright.

       -----------

Sixty years have passed,
They seem like seconds to me.
Eventually the clock will slow.
  But I won't recognize it
  I'll disguise it and fight it
And no boy's tricks will snatch a day I recall,
And they won't get me that way.

So he acts eccentric, 
Locks the dark around him
Noisy kids and family go.
  Maybe he is defeating
  The death that is seeping
Through his home, though he don't know.
Better to take your life than let it go.
   
       -----------

Far from the future,
Blood growing colder then, 
The cry of the gulls would make you weep.

Not now in clover,
A friend passes by and stops,
And closes your ageing eyes in sleep.
 
Now that you're gone 
Life and its hands are open.

The story is over,
You can rest silently,
Now you can give it all to me.

Eyelids forever closed,
Gliding with softer feet,
Open the doors and let you in.

Now that you're gone 
Life and its hands are open wide.


⁂