Your footprints mark the dirt in your garden.
Your finger prints are on the door frame.
Your handwriting tells me we need
Saskatoon berry jam
potatoes
and milk.
Your hair is tangled in your comb.
Your breath is in the bristles of your toothbrush.
Your head left its impression on your pillow.
Your scent is on your clothes in the closet.
But you
are gone.
Shawn L. Bird 
absolutely Breathtaking.. a soul bound within so few words..
Thank you for posting.
Thank you.
wow! excellently done!
Thanks.
This was indeed breathtaking and heartfelt and it brought tears to my eyes.
I’m honoured!
I feel the depth of your loss. May your cherished memories always bring warmth to your heart.
I’m glad you feel the sense of the loss, but understand that poets often write in persona, interpretating an image or feeling that is not necessarily applicable to their actual day to day experience. Imagination is a powerful tool to take observation and translate it into emotion on a page. A good writer should be able to take you on that emotional journey, whether or not s/he has actually been on the road.
While I have not experienced recent loss, I have friends in painful divorce situations, and I’ve been thinking about a student murdered last year and of friends who’ve died of cancer. The image in my mind was someone walking through the house coming home from a morgue, going to choose the clothing for the deceased to wear at the funeral, tracking the impressions of life left behind from drive way to closet.
I’m glad it was successful.
Ha ha… I should have known better since I have had the same experience before with someone else reading my poems. Well, hats off to your abitity to express another’s persona so vividly. I enjoy your work! 😉
I like it, you simply put it across in a way that I can feel. It’s a different style than my work and has a simple elegance. PS: thank you for stopping by at Pendragon’s poetry blog. I am touched that you returnedand used time to read my words.
thanks,
Alex
My pleasure. Thanks for dropping by!
you had
me
at
saskatoon berry jam
~
from
an
old sasky kid
We love saskatoon jam at our house. It’s a nice homey, Canadian kind of choice, I thought. 😉 (Though it rarely shows up on a grocery list, ’cause when the jar is about half empty hubby restocks it!)
haunting… you captured it
Thanks.
Beautiful! Couldn’t have been done better 🙂 nice to read your poems!
Thanks for coming by!
I love how you used so many senses in this piece. His smell, bits of hair, even his hand-writing… it is quite beautiful in it’s simplicity. Sensual speaking of deeper carnal desires. Lol I hope that comes across the way I mean to say!
Glad you like it.
Mmm…until you hit me with
“But you are gone.”
I wish I had bits of my father’s smell. Sometimes I sit while getting my oil changed and imagine him beside me calm and smiling as he often was. He smelled like oil and mechanic-like substances.
Do you have that sensation where you’ll catch a whiff on the breeze, and suddenly he’s there with you?
Absolutely. Sometimes smells that I don’t remember consciously associating with him as well…like, the smell of gardenias. I know they grew outside my childhood home in Miami. Smell is extraordinary in the memories it evokes.
Timeless.
It’s taken me some time to get here but…I want to thank you for following my blog and for your support of my work. It’s appreciated.
Ellespeth
You’re most welcome.
[…] you. […]
Yes, gone … but not for long??
Why is the person gone? In hospital with a trauma or terminal illness? Dead? Off on a business trip? Left with another lover? Child gone to college? Lots of possibility here.. 🙂 The ambiguity is part of the strength because it doesn’t matter. The one left behind is simply bereft.
couldn’t wait for you to buy the jam?
😉 Well, that’s a happier interpretation than I had when I wrote it!