December's Shade

December's Shade

Old age was a paper cut.
Death sat on a razor blade.
Sixty years of intimate.
Two circles made a single band.
December's shade pulled down in haste,
a Christmas fire this year is cold.
Your passing is a promenade
for seizures of my aching heart.
We weathered battle, peace as well.
A woman dies. A man remains.
The family tree is hollow now
without the ways you made it home:
nine-course meals with sips of wine;
warm that bit the chill in two--
our elbows frozen by the war.

My geriatric infancy at 87 tablets spent:
“I need you, need you, need you back.”
Cilantro in the soup of art.
When guns and tanks had stripped our land,
we swam the river in the night.
Fingers turned to cubes of ice.
Will would be our only pick.
Liberty's statue seemed too tall.
Refugees of heaven lost
in nothing but our muddy clothes.
No language, no villa,
no roses, no job. Just hope
like dusty spiderwebs between
an attic's cracking walls.

If cash is a climate of faith in sand,
we made clay from penniless.
The occupation stole our lives--
left us mere discarded crusts.
The tenderness of crisis breeds
a legend bearing fruit in pain.
Our journey bruised by German tanks
as pears that dot an orchard's skies.
Your ears were always ripe with sighs
that heard and felt the bruising rain.

Janet I. Buck

Posted over on Ariga