Reminder

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

When you are sleeping, you remind me of

The dead.  The dead do not communicate

No matter if they once were very love

Itself.  Your sleeping might be simple hate

Constructed from true beauty.   Frankenstein’s

Creation comes to mind.  A wife too good

To die a death with cancer’s stinging spines

Reducing her to painful balsa wood . . .

You call her back.  A man I loved with fierce

Devotion found himself destroyed by God

But you bring back that agony.  You pierce

Me, so your sleeping presence is not odd.

  Past pains are present as you breathe away

    Beside me.  You convince me not to pray.

~ Phillip Whidden