Blood feathers fall to the ground like ash
Blanketing a grave of hopes too high
All the things I gave and would have given
Disappear into a blackened sky
Entering your castle clearly defined
A two-sided mission, live or die
My mistake was to never take up the sword
To let you go without offering a fight
Even in those final months of life
When the end was constantly in sight
But I couldn’t imagine life without you.
How else would I sleep at night?
So soft was our destruction
It did little more than leave me with cracks
In turn it failed to kill
There were no knives in our backs
For you that was fine because
You’re not the one the darkness attacks.
So once I was back in your glorious presence
It was a fight to be something more
Or failing that, an excavation
Try and rid you from my core
And with the latter as reality
I could not comprehend the hurt in store
For I could never come home with you alive
Else the gravity would keep me forever close
To the poisons eventually spread in my soul
Evolving into the pain no one else knows
And in my struggle for death, I found
The dagger that you chose
A secret kept as we were slipping away
Shows how little I could know of you
And in every potential branch of the future
How little I’d ever be able to trust in you
Except in the necessarily miniscule miracle
Of you convincing me, of this sin, to forgive you
But that’s neither here nor there anymore
I speak only this time of what you chose to hide
The relief of pressure that helps me survive
The shit that always gets trapped inside
In some time I will heal and face tomorrow
Knowing you and I have at least died
While our essence remains
We can go our separate ways
We coexist and consider
What else lies in future days
And at last I can hope in tomorrow
From the ash, my soul to raise.
This is a hard poem to read, made easier with your grace. The closest thing I can meet it with is the breaking of my marriage and divorce. I know this may be a misread, because the details coincide with my experience. “Cardinal” is strenuous, well earned. Now that you have made this portal, write where it takes you. While I have put lavish time into this month, I will truly miss the connection with other poets and their writing. I wish the exchange could continue all year.
Rae, thank you so much for your words. You haven’t misread it all as this is about a relationship falling apart, where the separation of two people becomes permanent. This was not at all an easy poem to write, which is why it’s the perfect poem to end on. I personally feel a lot better with this written, reflecting the healing power that writing can bring. I will miss this community as well.
Philip, the rhyme helps provide structure to the narrative.
The rhyme helped a lot when it came to writing this, because it was difficult as hell to write. The most helpful decision was to switch from four line stanzas to six lines. If that hadn’t happened, I would never have completed this.