Dark Rough Memories, by Anton Nemeth

Dark Rough Memories

A tribute to Claudine Grantham

 

All the manufactured items of the world

Last for a while and then are randomly swirled

By human tossing or Nature’s elements

Into time’s rivers, there to be sediments

Seen on beaches, shores, lots, and hillsides strewn,

And what once was cut, planed, formed and careful built

From elements careless torn from Earth sans guilt

Now lays detrital testament to time’s ruin.

Through these exposed corpses wanders a woman

Reading a color, a shape as an omen

That this remnant or that relic is the one

To be chosen to be dragged like prey and done

Into a form to be bound by means of scraps

From workbench collections of nails, painter’s rags,

Fusing leavings together, even bin dregs,

Rotted scraps of deadwood and bent plumber’s straps.

 

These are the bones of humans numbly roughing

Over their Mother’s bare and unmade up face

This collector woman uses to embrace

The brute suddenness of her daughter’s passing

As she stitches and binds worn discarded things

Into great finely detailed dark somber blings

Remembering her lost daughter who’s not there

Whose dark complex cenotaphs these white walls bear.

 

Anton Z. Nemeth