your absence is a savage force

Here's todays entry from the pictured 2001 volume ...

...it's by Elizabeth Jennings and is one of the most powerful poems about lost love that I know:


Absence

I visited the place where we last met.
Nothing has changed, the gardens were well-tended,
The fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;
There was no sign that anything had ended
And nothing to instruct me to forget.

The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees,
Singing an ecstasy I could not share,
Played cunning in my thoughts. Surely in these
Pleasures there could not be a pain to bear
Or any discord shake the level breeze.

It was because the place was just the same
That made your absence seem a savage force,
For under all the gentleness there came
An earthquake tremor: fountain, birds and grass
Were shaken by my thinking of your name.

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Elizabeth Jennings (1926 - 2001)

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