Ordinary life creates
empty spaces
inside of me
composed of God-knows-what:

Pale-blue eyes
on a snow drop face
seen-through lace,
seen-through lace.

These empty waiting rooms of the heart,
set to tear us apart,
like ventricles of the brain, never seen again.

Birdsong flung
into fond recall
a dry-stone wall,
a dry-stone wall.

The smoky-smell of coal and steam
an evening’s desultoriness
or a young girl’s slight distress
as she leaves behind an empty nest.

Fleecy clouds on a dreary day
don’t fade away,
don’t fade away

Our tears mingle
in the spine-tingling haunting of the imagination
that is a prelude to a waking death:
echoes and shadows of those who walked before,
sitting on the floor of an  A&E trauma room.

Daffodils lean into a wind of change
whispering: begin again,
begin again.

Her isolated cry punctures the sky
disturbs the hush of illness
ignores the ever present caw-caw-cawing of the brazen crows,
across the road, in another century,
when the heated glow of household fires welcomed
tired soldiers home to share the beds of strangers.
and still her cries bounce from wall-to-wall....

Echoing what?

A grassy bank
to invest my time
no bells' chime,
no bells' chime.

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“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”

- Poem XL
― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad