SORROW AND JOY                                                             

We listened to a love song while we ate,

swallowing simple words, unquestioned

passports to our hearts; invading, possessing

our inner selves with the mellow, fashioned flow of a

voice that could touch us all, share her belief

that song is the measure and cure of grief.

 

What was it that made us blink, our noses run?

What sits across the tears of a lovers’ leap and a

mother’s tears of joy? And what of tears deployed

to deceive, to disguise a private celebration with

damp, red-ringed, rolling eyes, telling lies

with two fake teardrops, three false cries?

 

In the hidden midst of each of us, in the

dark inside where blood pumps, lungs heave,

where the brain’s million messages daily

flash hither thither, there must be a place where

passions meet, where senses, sentiments compete

in clashing gladiatorial feats.

 

There where lovers’ bodies boil, too hot to bear,

their tears flow to douse the flames of

love’s labours locked in fight – the cause perhaps

imagined merely, not really one that had begun

for any compelling reason. Yet, for their love,

autumn is the season and new leaves must

await a winter’s passage, while melancholy

sweetens in the early springtime sun.

 

And there a woman whose time has come

lays bare her being, screaming, pushing from

her deepest stores of strength and will;

the floods, the bursting of the river banks, now

all can flow, be washed away, her tears a

wave of thankfulness, draining off her pain.

Some trickle down her baby’s face; she

brushes each to leave a water trace.

 

And he who seeks to sway men’s minds

with slick displays of conjured tears

plies an ignoble trade; hiding words not his

inside his hat and singing notes plotted

on the palm of a hand; he might have

scratched his stories upon sea-washed sand.

He will be unmasked and kneel in time for

abusing the gentler of his kind.

 

So play again the song of joy and sorrow,

that cuts and moves with ease inside

to find that place of trysts and trials that

torments us in our very core. But we’ll

travel light on our journeys now we know

when true tears rise, just let them go.