The stranger at our table - Part One
By Geertje Jong
- 2042 reads
It is no longer about yesterday.
Or the future yet to come.
Death has crept into the shadow of our lives.
Eats away at the very fabric of our excistence.
Mort,the uninvited guest at our table.
I wait for the day when he reaches you a brand new coat.
Which fits you like a glove.
The day when you slip away through the back door
and follow him into the snow covered fields.
When I cook cabbage for our dinner, you tell me that it stinks.
I take the pan outside and open the windows to get rid of the putrid stench.
There are now so many other foods which you don't want to eat anymore.
You survive on yoghurt and white bread soaked in warm milk.
At night, when you slumber in the arms of Morphia,
I go to the outhouse and cook bacon and eggs or salmon with wasabi, on the little camping stove, which I dragged from the attic a few weeks ago.
As the distance between us grows wider the medicines in the basket grows higher, each time the doctor comes by.
Everything needs to be super clean, I scrub my fingers to the bone.
Behind the kitchen door hangs the white coat which I wear during the day.
As if that coat alone makes me sterile too.
I used to be your lover, now I am no more than your palliative carer, and you pour your anger into me.
Like you used to pour bronzes in your studio.
In the middle of the night I go to the meadow,
where the horses used to be.
And I shout and scream at the moon, which hangs with a mocking face low on the brow of the hill.
- Log in to post comments
Comments
thank you for sharing this
- Log in to post comments
me too. this is wonderful.
- Log in to post comments
A nice chunk of free verse,
- Log in to post comments
I agree, superb writing. A
k.
- Log in to post comments