Empty Nest

Who are they, these ghosts who flit into my life
and leave me foundering in treacherous waters
as I search for enlightenment and meaning?
Why do they return, revenants, to disturb
my peace and quiet, and to trouble my sleep?

I watch them wandering through the coal mines
of my mind, while yellow canaries twitter rage
from their cages. Oh, praise the blind pit ponies
whose blinkered eyes will never see the light.

They are so lonely, so distant, so lost in deep-down
galleries that I no longer know them.
Memory’s fish-hook cannot snag them,
cannot haul them back into daylight reality
far from night’s net of silvery dreams.

A place… a time…the sudden scent not of presence,
but of absence. The absence of movement,
noise, of that other body that once walked the rooms,
floors, opening and shutting doors, windows, a robin’s
whistle, a thrush’s trilled song… gone now, gone, all gone.

We drift through silent sadness, avoid each other’s eyes,
sit with our heads in our hands or knit our fingers together
in desperate gestures that express our emptiness,
the emptiness of an empty nest…

Comment:
So many people, leaving, drifting on, out, and away, so many empty nests left behind. Why do I grieve, when I know that this is the natural path of life? And for whom do I grieve, for myself, or for them? I do not know. I only know that when that last visitor leaves the party and the door finally closes, the walls close in and I am left alone in this emptiest of nests.

To sleep, perchance to dream. And that is when they return, those broken ghosts who visit me at night and fill my empty head with memories, some happy, some beautiful, some ugly, and some of them sad. They fly, tiny silent birds, when the first rays of the sun, hit my window and awaken me. But they endow my day with memories – each morning marked by the rawness of a nightmare, or the sweetness of a midsummer night’s dream.