Tag: loss

Unanswered Questions

Unanswered Questions

The past only an arm’s length away 
A glimmer of what once was
still shines briefly in the darkness
where you now reside 

Savagely robbed of love far too soon
A life taken.  Snuffed out like a candle
Leaving your body paralyzed, unable to move
As if limbs had been amputated

How can a heart still beat when broken?
Thrown so cruelly into
the dark corners of the mind
where questions will go unanswered


Copyright © 2022 Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing
All Rights Reserved

Grace is hosting Open Link Night at D'Verse Poets

Turning The Page

Turning The Page

The writing is on the wall
The letters are big and bold
and you still don’t see it
It could be in neon lights
but you will squint and look
the other way
It is the end of a chapter
and time to turn the page

The storybook beginning
became an arduous read
We got lost in the
descriptive passages
of someone else’s love story
Refusing to read between
the lines and closing the book
to avoid the obvious ending


Copyright © 2022 Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing


Word Prompt

Page - Stream of Consciousness Saturday

True Love – A Cadralor

True Love

Shivering, the young woman stepped outside
pulling on the toggle of her duffle coat
shielding herself from the blistering wind
Just after five and darkness had already fallen
as she headed west on the tree-lined avenue

An old man sat quietly in the corner of the café
Staring into his bottomless cup of coffee
Ignoring hunger pains, twiddling with the
hole in the left finger of his old gloves
His head filled with memories suppressed

An elegant woman sat upright with a fixed smile
He, a puffed up blowhard, at the microphone
Commanding attention with his loud voice
and phony diatribe as kiss-asses drooled
Her body ached and her mind lived in the past

A lifetime ago two kids had clung to each other
Inseparable, joined at the hip, in love
She from the house on the hill, privileged
He from the other side of the railroad tracks
His intellect and her beauty, a winning combo

The young woman saw him in the cafe, head lowered
It had been a long time passing before her call to him
Entering he looked up at her, eyes clouded, and she went to him
Her father embraced her and she clung to him tightly
He needed to know his one true love was dying


Copyright © 2021 Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing
All Rights Reserved

Bjorn is hosting D'Verse Poets and has prompted us with a form
called Cadralor.
The cadralor is a poem of 5, unrelated, numbered stanzaic images, each of which can stand alone as a poem, is fewer than 10 lines, and ideally constrains all stanzas to the same number of lines. Imagery is crucial to cadralore: each stanza should be a whole, imagist poem, almost like a scene from a film, or a photograph. The fifth stanza acts as the crucible, alchemically pulling the unrelated stanzas together into a love poem. By “love poem,” we mean that your fifth stanza illuminates a gleaming thread that runs obliquely through the unrelated stanzas and answers the compelling question: “For what do you yearn?”

Image by Please Don't sell My Artwork AS IS from Pixabay

My poem is featured on MasticadoresUSA

I am honored that another of my poems, “Where Do We Go From Here?” is featured today on MasticadoresUSA. Please visit their site to view it and see other fine works from our fellow bloggers. You may also read it here.

Thank you all for your continued support of my poetry. It is much appreciated.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Now the love has gone 
and open wounds will not heal
Wanting to move on
but paralyzed limbs
are planted in stone

Neither wanting to make a decision
Who will go first
to choose freedom?
Is that what it will be? Free from each other?
Did we try hard enough, if at all?

Too in love to let it go
and break the tie that binds
Who is fooling who?
The love is missing
What magnetic force is in play?

Is it time to rip off the Band Aid
we plastered on the cuts and bruises
from angry words weaponized?
Time to stop kissing better
those things that won’t ever?

I will mourn each day
Because he is gone
You are now living in his body
But you are not him
You are a shadow of who he once was

You look like him
But you are someone else
A person I don’t know
A stranger in my midst
who sees someone else
when he looks at me

Where do we go from here?


Copyright © 2021 Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing
All Rights Reserved

Ripples

Ripples

In youth
we search for those
appealing to the eye
Their beauty would cause
a heart to skip
and our desires
live at the forefront
of their presence
 
We decorate each other
in brilliance of diamonds
and hold the other
in high esteem
as a possession
Only the most fortunate
can hold on to the gift
bestowed on them
 
Many will lose their grasp
and happiness slips away
over and over
The sting of pain
unseen, internal
Love a gift that
keeps on giving
Healing wounds
 
Scars remain
of memories faded
Dissolving in the lake
of recollection where
coming, going,
the waterbirds
don’t leave a trace
only ripples of once was
 
 
Copyright © 2020 Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing
All Rights Reserved

Laura Bloomsbury is hosting D'Verse and has prompted
us with "Stepping off the sidewalk" and allowing ourselves
to look inside ourselves. (I chose number 2 -  by Dogen)

Here are 8 fragments from the mystic poets as prompt. Choose ONE, include the words in your poem or title if you wish, or write it as an Epigraph at the start of your poem and always cite the author too.


1. Our hearts irrigate the earth. We are fields before each other (Thomas Aquinas)
2. Coming, going, the waterbirds don’t leave a trace (Dogen)
3. Why should not the water find delight in the floral fragrance of its own rippled surface? (Jnanadev)
4. To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night (Gibran)
5. Like a ruby held up to the sunrise. Is it still a stone, or a world made of redness? (Rumi)
6. My heart was split, and a flower appeared (Solomon)
7. The mountain path leads skyward and dissolves into light (Tukaram)
8. Ask no questions of the moth in the candle flame (Attar)

Image by Mabel Amber from Pixabay 
 

Collateral Damage

Collateral Damage

You bring me flowers
after the rain
Thoughtful gestures
Romantic, sincere
I settle into a cocoon
of forgetfulness
Languishing
in your attention
Misread, phony
Serving a purpose,
but not mine
I cannot be bought
I am here
I am real
I was born at night,
but not last night
Seeing it for what it is
About you and what
money can buy
I am collateral damage
to be written off
Easy come, easy go
without the bat
of your eyelid
I will swallow my pride
one more time
Disappointment
a bitter pill to swallow
but each time
I become more immune
 

Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing ©

Mish is hosting D'Verse Poets Open Link Night

Image by Claudio_Scott from Pixabay 

Taking a Knee – Ironic





Like you I have struggled to find the words to respond to the horror of the murder of George Floyd before my very eyes. A man who allegedly tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill was immediately regarded as a thief and killed without a trial or a chance to plead his case. Was he a threat to society? Did the police treat him this way for our own good? Absolutely not.

The irony of this story is he was killed by the knee of a policeman. If you remember it was just a few short years ago that quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem in silent protest to the unjustified police killings of African Americans. His action was quickly adopted by many players in the NFL and every Sunday we saw them all taking a knee prior to the game. Kaepernick was promptly fired by the San Francisco 49ers and was ostracized by other teams who regarded him as an unpatriotic troublemaker and he never played in the NFL again. His career was ruined for protesting and highlighting that Black Lives Matter. Instead of acknowledging what he was protesting, his critics were deeply offended by his disregard for the flag and thought that was more egregious. “Taking a Knee” as it was referred to quickly picked up steam and it was adopted by many sports personalities. They became targets of Trump and were treated despicably.

Now a policemen has used his own knee to publicly take the life of an African American. Where is the justice?

Today I am ashamed of America.

Taking a Knee

We watched
as the horror unfolded
He lay helpless on the ground
Hands behind back
Cuffs binding wrists
Immobile 
Yet a knee on the neck
Unnecessary
Arrogance and power
pressing down hard
Choking life from his body

Oh the irony of the knee!

Silent Sunday protests
Peacefully and respectfully
objecting
to police brutality
Taking a knee
Only to be
Criticized
Deviled
Ostracized
Unemployed

and threatened with
silent warnings

You take a knee
and our knee will
Take the breath
from your body

... and they did

Racism lives on
in the USA

Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing ©

Rest In Peace George Floyd, you will never be forgotten
and your death will not be in vain. #blacklivesmatter


Prompts
RDP - For our good
FOWC - Thief

Lost Souls – Poem of the Month – June 2020

Lost Souls

Only the sea
could match the anger
Only wind could
howl with more clangor
Here no one listens
and there’s no one to call
An unheard scream
goes where dead words fall
In the furor of crashing waves
drowning the agony of woes
The significance of their pain
wasted on those no one knows
Flowers waving in sympathy
as they slip to a watery grave
Where lost souls are bound
and not one person can save


Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing ©

In response to Sue Vincent's Weekly Write/Photo

Imprisoned

Imprisoned

Trapped in a prison
of memory 
Alone with
a heart destroyed
Watching hopes
and dreams go
around and round
like a circle
in a spiral 
spinning
downwards
out of control
Impossible
to save them
No desire to
try anymore
Accepting of
the cruel fate that
robbed me of you
Leaving me with
thoughts of what
might have been




Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing ©

Grace is hosting Open Link Night at D’Verse Poets tonight 
Bush Boy is hosting today's RDP prompt “Like a circle in a spiral”

Blurred View

Blurred View

Seeing the broken pieces
of what is left
of this fractured life
laying before me 
I am unable to make sense
of what is happening
 
Uncontrollable tears
blur my view
It matters not what
is presented to me
but how I feel
inside my heart
 
Did I feel it slipping
through my fingers
before it crashed to the floor?
Did I miss the warning signs?
I stare into the sky as
the last light of dusk is fading
 
Pink hues painted across
the evening canvas
A moment to pause and
wonder at the
beauty before me
but it means nothing
for I care no more
 
 
Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing ©

I response to Sue Vincent's weekly
write/photo challenge

D’Verse Poets Open Link Night
hosted by Grace 
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