#1: Stirring the ashes

Join the AVBOB Poetry Project in celebrating the month of love with a series of love poems selected from over 22 000 poems published within the free-to-access AVBOB Poetry Library. To read more poems from the library, click here: https://www.avbobpoetry.co.za/Poem/ViewAll

Stirring the Ashes

English poem by: Dorian Haarhoff

Theme: Love

How does love change

after the one you love

has left the song of this life

and joined the lateful dead?

Do they remain still loved

in frozen Arctic waste,

while you keep wandering

south into tropic climes?

You travel to foreign places,

dine in restaurants, swim in oceans

and walk holy-pilgrim paths

unknown to them.

You tick off a bucket list

as the anniversaries –

birth, marriage, death –

amble, then accelerate, past you.

We take them along

with us the only way we know,

in the stories we tell of them,

told to fellow high-flying strangers.

Suddenly, to those they never met,

our loved one glows alive

as you breathe into their expired fires,

stirring the ashes

with the bellows of your memory.

In the light of your telling,

they cavort again,

unfreezing in the flame.

Are you interested in contributing your poetry to the AVBOB Poetry Library? Simply enter the next AVBOB Poetry Competition (set to open on 1 August 2024 and close on 30 November 2024. Judges will carefully review all entries and the very best poems will be selected for publication and stand a chance of winning one of the R10 000 grand prizes for the top poems in each of 11 language categories. Register your profile so long by visiting www.avbobpoetry.co.za