More Bitter Than Sweet Poem by Bill Galvin

This trip is certainly bittersweet.
Maybe a turn for the better will happen.

Now there is no home I belong to.
My house awaits my return,
But it is not a home if without love,
Without my Love, my sweet Deborah.

So what do I look forward to?
When do I end this trip?
The mortician was kind enough to give me
A good portion of your beautiful locks for me
To journey with, and reunite with nature
At our meaningful spots around the country.

I parse them sparingly, as if strands of gold,
Since I don’t know how many places…
We had so many great memories
In our travels together.
I cannot drop them all in one place.

When we’d be away for a while together,
Returning to favorite places, or
Discovering new natural wonders,
We’d sometimes wear ourselves out,
And not mind leaving for home.
Arriving home, we’d say it’s good to be home,
Until the next adventure idea percolated.

But, now there is no home.
Not without my Honey Pie.
There is just a shell of a former life,
Like the empty shells you find abandoned
And falling in on themselves along desert roads,
From so long ago, no one knows who lived there.
There were lives there once,
But they and their life prints are lost forever.

We learned to live for one another,
To give till all was depleted.
So, life seems a tad directionless now.

I plod along, parched and dry,
Missing your sweet kisses, but,
Open to any signposts from the Great Spirit.

4-2-2015 (Northern Arizona)