Missing
By John Herlihy

A cup of porcelain, shiny and delicate,
Full to the brim of desire and yearning.
Smoldering emotions come together and intertwine,
Threads in life’s tapestry crack aloud in their burning.

Threads of life’s emotions weave among themselves.
When they touch, they appear as a spark of light.
Missing is like that, pure starlight amid the darkness.
When the threads touch, absence has vanished into night.

My mother returns periodically;
When she comes, I am still child to the mother.
My father still comes to me in dreams,
His smile always as supportive as it seems.
I am missing them both, where have they gone and why,
To think they have now become merely figments in the sky.

It is often like that, this missing,
Oh how it comes upon us in surges and waves,
Like falling snow, it heaves unexpectedly down from the heavens.
But when it arrives, it brings with it a peace that saves,
Missing feels like being asleep under meters of snow,
Dreaming of all the lost things one could ever come to know.

It is often like that, this missing,
Oh how it feels like falling and simply falling,
Falling and never landing, with surges of loss appalling,
Like autumn leaves we drift down from glorious heights,
Missing this, that and the other thing now gone from our sights.
Refusing not to miss anything, as if that would make a difference,
Hearing imperious silence when you know there should be inference.

It is often like that, this missing,
Oh how it arrives from the blue black of endless night,
Shining gloriously like clusters of a billion tiny stars.
Winter days that have now become shorter.
The rest of the day gone missing, where has it gone?
Every day become a night for the want of someone missing,
A new beginning becomes an end, an old absence now a friend.

What remains is sheer memory where missing prevails;
Colors take on their original hue as we go about our travails.
But even the cold gives white breath, we feel alive,
Missing brings people and things back on cat’s paws.
Every padded step cautious and firm with retracted claws,
When behold, in my pocket, a porcelain cup I find.
A piece of my heart, once missing, never far from my mind.