The widower

The widower

The mourners gone, he felt no need

to mark her passing with a stone:

her ashes swirled into the wind

to fly or fall where they’d be blown,

as fields and copses called her name

in silence louder than he’d known,

on hillsides permanently changed,

and paths he’d now patrol alone.

He stripped the house on to the lawn –

wallpaper, sofa, tables, phones,

chairs, carpets, clothes – and burned it all:

a perfect pyre of what they’d owned…

and turned his back upon the flames

to pick a single rose she’d grown

then sat and watched its slow decay

for days, within their hollow home.

Published in Acumen vol 88 Summer 2017