Every Sorrow & Joy Imaginable Poem by Mark Heathcote

This Earth plays artful music from sorrow to joy
sure, we-are-but instruments to be played.
Hark! Does not the Songbird sing sweet, never coy-
though ear-piercingly can squawk a good masquerade
in milk & honey, her beauty is unquestionable.
Such desert roses are as prevalent as weeds
violets with bloodied thorns, our days disreputable
torn apart by the ever-changing wind that cleaves
like a suckling child who is now cruelly weaned.
Flung every which way their canvases stretched-
out, framed & stapled, life-is-such a feigned-
at death's embrace, no more will it be wretched
except for the night of the nightingales' last song
to his lover, in answer to all her joys & sorrows
that came never having any more night-long
terrors the cosmos—bring them no new tomorrows.