i.
Here is sunlight in a reluctant dawn, and we
turn, sleep-eyed, to the glow in the window,
chasing away the night's encroaching dark;
so runs the story of the morning.
And the afternoon lazes, stretches
like yellow silk across the day.
And the sunlight catches across your face,
In the tilt of your palm; in the turn of your head,
gold. The summer-sweat trickles down our backs.
Here is in the tilt of this hand
the intimation of immortality.
ii.
Hands,
the smooth shift of bones beneath the skin
in the hour of waiting. This is the hand
winding itself carefully around the words;
telling the story of the ink
splayed across the paper. This
is the awkward hand. And somehow, thought
is trammeled; captured in dark lines
and yet left unsaid. Cast, into the dark.
And I refuse, then, to believe that we have grown
apart, and grown somehow
grave.
iii.
The lamplit endings of our slow-tarnishing days,
Stretch on past all reason.
And I have thought,
remember this, remember them all,
as kingdoms rise so too they
fall.
iv.
The world might indeed run smoother
if people, like the denizens of the cosmos,
took their places in neat order.
But it might be a greyer world.
But if, in order, you and I
undistant and not unbrothers -
(in un-moving and un-seeing
I have let it slip away.)
v.
There are two worlds,
the remembered and the possible.
Perhaps in the sweeping brushstrokes
of our eventual defeat, we might have painted
a little differently, or painted
in a different pattern;
Perhaps in this tangle of words, hotly spoken
and burning, rancid, bitter, on the tongue,
we could have written other stories.
I stood in the still-shadow, and watched you
leave (a place which was not-home)
and thought
It could have been otherwise,
other-time.
But in that moment you fell away,
inevitable, and ending
as the rise and fall of kingdoms.
(And I stand,
in the still-shadow,
and watch you go.)
On The Rise And Fall Of Kingdoms by Noldo
Chapter Notes: Perhaps a slightly under-stated interpretation of the theme. Hopefully, sufficient.
Last line of the first stanza drew inspiration from the title 'Intimations of Immortality' (Wordsworth).