Looking At You Posing With The Plants... Poem by RIC BASTASA

it has been years since you retired as a professor of
Humanities while i continue working in the judiciary and
sometimes i go face-booking to see you tending some
flowering plants as though you have deciding to go into
agriculture, or a florist of some sort, as you age and being
alone in that white house with a mural of flowers on the wall.

i still wonder what is inside you, how lonely could it be alone and abandoned, you told me once that one by one they left you and you did nothing to take them back.

you have traveled a lot, roamed Europe and then India and
Cambodia and then with this covid times, somehow you have to stay in the house being a senior and impoverished what with a pension enough for you to survive the daily demands of living.

as i see you lonely and alone, i decided to move on with my work and never thinking of retiring early, because as i have told you the only meaning of my life is my work and there is nothing and there is no one else.

ah, before i forget, i still hold on to poetry, somehow it is therapeutic, and in a sense, makes life beautiful makes me see old views in the new light, letting me into a phenomenon as though i am born everyday, crying like a baby, and then taken by my mother, as i turn into the comfort of her soft bosom and then my satisfying silence.