COMPASSION

[Maureen K Clifford]

COMPASSION

He placed fresh flowers on the unmarked mound missing a name and with his knife and a broken stick made a hole big enough to take the rose cutting that he had bought for his Rose..............

He felt that everything around him was slowly falling down,
his life felt pointless and aimless, so he rarely went to town.
His whole life, his farm, his thoughts now seemed devoid of direction
and it all began at this place – this sad house of correction
for those whose minds were troubled. It reposed now an empty shell.
Morriset now rested quietly, those rooms had once been hell
for the inmates who were held there often times against their will
but the history of the world tells such tales as this and still
it goes on – only one answer – but help was slow in coming.
Sitting beneath winter white skies, in his head tunes were humming.
Those old songs they often danced to – though his Rose would dance no more.
He came back to reality and gazed around and saw
red bricks decaying ‘neath the sun, the graffiti covered rooms.
He brushed a spiders web away, entered into the gloom.

A figment of imagination? Was it a ghostly wraith?
Had he really heard her voice again or was it a mistake?
Time had passed – so many years now, though it seemed like yesterday
and each day he had berated himself for the role he’d played.
She was disconsolate with grief for the small child that they’d lost
and she couldn’t grasp reality – on sorrows waves was tossed
with no one there to help her, she had run, crazed and demented
through the paddocks, bare feet bleeding – on her his rage he’d vented.
And he’d lost his Rose that night the girl she was did not return,
just an empty shell with vacant eyes in which no fires burned
and they said she needed help and it was help he could not give;
they took his sweet Rose to this place – here she died. She could not live
with the pain and hurt inside her, and the dogs of dark despair.
They found her one night hanging – and so her body buried there
in an unmarked grave – where other souls also embraced the earth
of the Mother, not the lover, ‘neath the soft green emerald turf.

He placed fresh flowers on the unmarked mound missing a name
and a cross he’d carved himself in Bushman fashion.
Tenderly planted the rose cutting that he’d bought from home,
from her gardens favourite rose bush called ‘Compassion’.


Maureen Clifford © 01/11