They’ll never know the half of it.
The world in its fiery youth.
The Garden of Eden
uprooted a million times a million.
The strange painter,
writing graffiti on the walls of mountains,
long since melted by time.
The torrid love affairs
that yielded to blows.
How hard love struggles.
The bodies of Pompeii
embracing their children.
The petals of geologic time in a poem,
in a drawer,
in a book.
They’ll never know the half of it,
that woman stumbling
along the aisle way of a store.
The orphan in a prison cell.
The saint who had nothing
to give away.
The long and short of everything
is,
in the end,
silence.
A white rose on a grave.
A book of blank pages.