Never Heard from you
I never heard from you
When the wintery blizzards
Battered the countryside
Your absence froze my heart
Like the frost on the ground
I never heard from you
When the daffodils
And the murmur of the birds
Announced spring
I never heard from you
As the season of new beginnings came and went
My heart filled with renewed hope
With the warmth of summer.
As leaves fell in autumn
The headlines were about a local hero...
I will never hear from you!
Explanation about the poem
This poem was written for a creative writing class.
I had never dared write poetry as my genre is fiction until this wonderful person running the course encouraged us all to experiment with poetry.
This is a dedication to all the loved ones we have lost and also to those left behind. At the end of the day it is the ones left behind who suffer.
It could be a soldier never returning to his family. With all the turmoil in the world, wars and revolts, so many of our soldiers are taken away from us. When we are not sure, we always hang on to the last bit of hope. Hence "...heart filled with renewed hope..."
A father walking out one day and never returning. A close friend told me that when she was ten, her father walked out one day never to be seen ever again. She is over forty now and she is still hoping he will turn up one day...She spends time with her father's brothers trying to keep the faint memory of her father alive. This pain for me is so deep and yet not one you can easily share with others. Waiting and waiting, until the waiting becomes unbearable and finally we would rather know the person we are waiting for is dead so we can stop waiting.
Even if these people are proclaimed heros, the pain felt by those who are left behind never goes away.
I was in a melancholic mood feeling a great sense of loss when I wrote it.
This poem as many of my other subsequent poems, also deal with my own loss. As it happened, I started writing poems after my mother was diagnosed with cancer and I went through a period of hope and despair on a daily basis.
When finally my mother passed away after a lot of suffering, I felt this strong weight on my heart as if someone had put the heaviest stone in there. And 'your absence froze my heart' was the closest I could get to describing the feeling.
I also dreamt a lot of my mother and often in my dreams she had miraculously recovered and it felt that the waiting and the hoping had all been worthwhile.
On a lighter note, the change in seasons have a great impact on most of us. I absolutely do not like winter, except when I am skiing but love spring the season of new beginnings.
So the poem reflects my mood during the various seasons.
