K.M. Preston: ‘For Michael Dransfield’, ‘Grasmere’ and ‘Grief Feels Like Fear’

For Michael Dransfield

I’m not into revision. If you don’t
like my poem I’ll write you another.
You drink them neat or not at all.

Unrequited love. What a shipwreck,
but surely food for the poetic soul,
the way it maps nuances in your skin.

I dream my words ebb on the leaves
of time-distanced language as
unquiet waves, restless

yet touched by those who see
on unblemished page the echoes
of what might have been.

K. M. Preston

Grasmere

The brother and sister amble quiet and gentle on Grasmere’s shore,
absorbing the vista all sky-pastel shimmer and daffodils,
devouring the mandarin sunset with squid-ink pupils
in the insatiable hunger of the poetic mind.

Later, inkblot scratching in the candlelit confines
of the Cottage of the Dove, it is Dorothy not William
whose contemplation conjures the one transcendent line,
ambling through mind-space dimensions that cannot be rushed.

K.M. Preston

Grief Feels Like Fear
for C.S. Lewis

Not with the fury of Heathcliff’s boundless grief
at Cathy’s stormy graveside did you seek
an end to torment.

No ghost embrace to salve regrets of unlived pasts,
a gentle measured sorrow saw you reach at last
for journalled solace.

But if silence is the only word sufficient for this pain,
if apologetics prove to be of little lasting gain
against this shadow,

if grief so individual, a thumbprint whorl of signature,
has cold earth grip-like dread, what hope of cure
for beating hearts?

K.M. Preston