The Sorrow of a Brown Hat by Steven McCabe
by Steven McCabe
Crumpled fading newsprint
As yesterday’s armies march
Into tomorrow
A future we predicted
We accepted sleep standing upright
Sleep never understood;
A chapter of blank pages: my darling, your wrist hanging
Over the bed
Your blood a confusion
Your heartbeat the black window
Swallowing my hands
Fingers forming a circle
Bottom of a fleet casting shadows across the seabed
I toss my hat overboard
from my book Hierarchy of Loss (2007) Ekstasis Editions
poemimage 
Smudgy, charcoaled ache and beauty.
Charcoaled ache! That really does nail it. Multi-dimensional
& succinctly phrased. Thank you Karen.
Here and with the knights, there is a form that is holding a space for the lost that might return. It fades and finds light again. Or the permanent form of the soldier is revisited by soul after new soul.
Sarah, your sense of poetic movement really sits at the centre of your impressions which I most appreciate. It seems that in the swirl you are finding the emotions. Thank you.
Blank pages and someone’s blood being a confusion: these are unmistakable signs of a grand dissolution, the stigmata of a last gasp.
exiledprospero… your perceptions clearly seeing something I didn’t know I had revealed. You must have been perceiving both emotionally and intellectually at the same time. Thank you.
These comments are so brilliantly worded they make me feel I have journeyed into some realm…a constellation…