September grieves in me;
My child, lost, shines
In the New Hampshire afternoon.

Words leave my mouth,
Weighted as apples
On a tree; words farmed

 
Long ago in a room
In Swansea, damp
With a coffined silence.

 
I read to people
I will never reach.
We are all in shadows.

 
A poem is not a step
In one’s ambition;
The drama of it

 
Is not an act
To get somewhere.
‘I am a singer merely,

 
I sing my song’.
Something there is
In me

 
That loves a wall,
The separation
From others.

 
‘No more heroes,
No more dreams,
Life’s what it is,

 
Not what it seems’
I wrote long ago
When the stars fell down.

 
And how their child lost,
Robert’s and Eleanor’s,
Shines in my mind.

 
Their folding
Of the clothes
No longer needed;

 
The falling emptiness;
The ‘Why?’ crying
Through the heart’s universe,

 
The scream of the blood
That the staring eyes shed.
Grief, a visitor,

 
In the rooms of the head.
Something there is
In me

 
That loves a wall,
The separation.
My words,

 
Their words, fall
Like apples
When there

 
Is no-one around,
And the air, natural as God,
Consumes the song.

Peter Thabit Jones © 2016

Published in SELECTED POEMS (Bilingual: English/Romanian), 2016