You Were Mine Poem by Caroline Misner

Does the fog outside the window
ferret a lingering death?
I don’t know.
The snow has caked its crystals
to a deep lustre,
the night has hardened with rain
that will thicken to sleet by morning.

But all is good,
the world is ripe with new disasters
that will be forgotten in a hundred years,
just as the blisters of the past
have been deleted.

You were mine!
You were mine, small sinner,
the day you squirmed from me like an eel.
We all stood round you and wept,
wept because you wept.
I tried,
I tried to feed you with my body
but neither of us
would put up with that.

So eighteen years later, this
is how we meet—embracing,
declaring our love for one another;
now neither of us
has the courage to weep

A dull ember flickers
in the hearth and dies,
in a haloey shadow of gas.
It is not real.
You offer words of comfort
and I believe them.
you’ve left me nothing
else to believe in.

Love hauled me away.
Sometimes, I think, I should
have never loved you at all.
Then it would be easy.
What a pitiful thing love should be.
For every dropp I’ve squandered, I’ve received
an equal dropp of pain, remorse:
a two sided coin I toss
and catch,
every day, and hope
the right side
will land.