Undercurrents

Undercurrents of a weeping world
swirl above black waters
beneath the trees, I whisper pleas
I love you

Eddying down to who-knows-where
the eye of a storm’s dead certainty
with death, the singularity 
that takes you

Flowers float the River Styx
The Ferryman emerges from
a three-decades-long mist, insists
I’ve missed you

I light a candle in a cell
leave blooms before the river’s swell
the only truth I have to tell:
I love you

Written for earthweal

For this week’s challenge, Brendan asks us to:

attune to one or more of the world’s changing voices in a poem. Tell us about a memorable storm or fire or other natural calamity you witnessed, as both external and internal event. Or describe the empty space left by an animal lifeform now extinct, like the Chinese river dolphin or ivory-billed woodpecker: how does that absence affect the time’s melodies? What new symphonic textures are found in lengthening seasons and strange new currents? How do the mind’s colors change, how does the heart sing, where do the ghosts gather and how does the instrument sound using a profoundly changing bow? And where is the hope? How would you address these insights for time, as in a note left on a table for one’s children’s or rolled in a tight scroll and squeezed into a bottle to set on the tide.

The sound is grievous but the message is hope: Out of what wood and gut could such a lyre be fashioned?

I could only really think of my mother at this time, who died 32 years ago yesterday, at the age of 32. I suppose for me, hope for the earth, and indeed for all things, lies in the love which makes some measure of grief almost inevitable.