Tag: visual poetry

A Candle for Ambiance

They won’t admit it,
but some people watch the dying
like they’re afraid they might learn something.
As if death might notice them noticing
and turn its face.

Curtains breathe apart.
The flick of a lighter,
a kettle’s shriek,
a phone buzzing with quiet verdicts.

“Ambulance again.”
“He’s outside.”
“Still no movement.”

The grief is tidy at this distance.
Contained.
No blood.
No sound.
No scent.
Only flashing lights

and the shoulder of a woman
who doesn’t wipe her eyes.

Down the street, someone stirs onions.
Steam fogs a window.
Someone lights a candle
and pretends it’s for ambiance,
an apology for not knocking.

We’ve forgotten how to enter mourning
without needing an invitation.
We’ve made grief a spectator sport —
a flickering feed,
a casserole dropped at the door.

But still —
still someone watches,
and someone cooks,
and someone texts,
and someone doesn’t know what to say,
so they say nothing,
and let the pot boil instead.

Because when death comes
and you weren’t the one beside it,
you still want the dying to know —
I saw you.
Even if only
through the window.

At Dusk, Everything Looks Blue

First Darkness

In the eastern sky,
the first star is out.
A single bone, white
and sharp, socketed.

At dusk, everything looks blue.

The world bleeds warmth,
the cool colour of a vein
beneath skin.

Blue,
a bruise that remembers pain.
The horizon swallows its fire,
draws itself inside out,

like a map of your skin,
the only territory that matters.

Call west,
where copper ember drowns.
Call south,
where roots grow dense in soil.
North,
where tightening cold locks earth in silence.
East.

Call light back into your eyes
before this star is joined by its legion,
an ossuary of ancient fire,
a cold promise
marker of what is gone.

Do it now.
Gather the last light like a thief.
Strike a match in the cave of your chest.
Let it catch.

For this is first darkness.
It waits, patient as stone,
to see if you will be its pupil,
or its kindling.

The Lamp and Ashes I

I thought mystery would arrive like theatre—
a word of fire;
but mystery came as the discipline of the unseen:
a quiet hand smoothing what anger split,
mercy set stone by living stone,
the heart’s small trowel moving in silence
to hold what would fall.

So I began to carry you outward—
not as a lantern lifted for praise,
but as a hidden flame kept from wind.
I let you level my gaze
until I could meet the stranger
without hunger for rank or reward.
I learned to bow to grey hair
as one bows to snowfall—
not because it is weak,
but because it has endured.

I kept a white cloth at the waist of thought—
not a badge, but a reminder:
keep clean hands, keep humble hands,
even when the world is mud.
A beehive woke beneath my ribs,
a humming labour of care,
each small sweetness made by work,
not by talk.

When widows stood at winter’s edge,
I tried to be a door that did not slam.
When shame hung like a torn coat,
I tried to stitch dignity into the seam.

And where the common road is held by law—
that hard iron that keeps the cart from chaos—
I did not spit on it for pride’s sake;
I honoured the order that lets the weak sleep.
Yet I remembered: obedience without morality
is only a well-swept cage.
So I kept you burning—
a private tribunal of conscience,
a lamp that judges without hatred.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.