InterBoard Poetry Competition

PEJORATIVE REQUIEM IN MEDIAS RES
      Nicky Testavudo
      (About Poetry Forum)

& you and i and you
would not, now, not
& i and you and i
would not, now, not,
in autumn’s hushed whisper, when
then becomes now, and now, in stark stillness,
i scan a sameish field,
grown fallow and rutted, as
i watch the dead appear,
moving slow like mist, that
takes familiar form
as i

slide slow across the space where
smooth lips once parted without effort
to breathe concept into form;
to fill spaces in
between breaths, when

you would release me at midnight with the nudge
of a single finger tip

you would release me at midnight in the guise
of a little white bird

you would leave me to flit amongst the bodies
of the fallen soldiers

you would beckon me to lift the eyelids
of the mouldering dead

i would, in feckless freedom,
winnow through the fertile clay beneath the humid earth
of one woman’s living history
all the time my back turned brazenly
to the moon

the secrets of the dead
would refine my silhouette
define my outmost
boundaries as white on black
and afterwards I would return at dawn
with secret maps of you

you told me that nothing i said
nothing you said you said nothing
would ever come between us
between us but between us
is where i, not you, i, am rooted
and you, not i, you, have grown
brittle as husk dicarded
by insect having shed its skin

i

find now
that my wings have been clipped and

i

leap
back
from the nothing in between them
and you
and

i

am dust dull mist soft silt sliding over dry earth
no longer gently leavened by sweet breath
that you would now hold fast
behind closed lips and
in between smooth
finger
tips

and i, facing the moon,
the sun at my
back