Lost Hearts Poem by Barry Van Asten

But for a shared moment, long ago...
Your voice is painful to me now;
There has been too much said and done between us
And I have shrunk from the world I used to know.

And there are no simple words, just stupid
Things that we said in the past;
Now an impossible cosmos of hurt feelings
Where two hearts had won and lost.

But it's awful how we dream, somehow,
Of sorrow's wickedness in the heart,
For I made a Pompeii of my love
And buried the whole damn lot.

And you will pass as in some dream
Where echoes of those far off days
Shall murmur, winter-thick and constantly:
Love and us remain always.

But my mammoth love was cooled by Severn
Since long before your birth, I said.
Yet still the soft voice whispered near:
Give our unbroken love delight.

And I am obsessed with dead time
And other things shall follow soon.
I do not know of love or its ways
Because of unnatural reserve, nothing evolves.

But like ancient stones we'll stand,
Labouring under some misplaced spell
That will tick us to the end of time,
Into it's blue-lipped oblivion.