The Gift You Gave Me Poem by Matthew Lumley

Though the cutter’s work was done
Long before I entered in that wood,
Every notch you hewed drew
My blood out of the bark,
And every curving of the steel
Forced silent pleas out from your mouth.
Or was I already deaf?

Your blood still is on the leaves,
Above my head in dark and heavy drops,
Like the sluggish oil from such black moods,
The guilty water from anguished depths,
The tortured storms
And fragile ice that all, wide and floating,
In eyes I thought were only yours,
I discovered in my mirror.

And may that gift you gave me drown all my future loves
And may that gift you gave me kill all my future loves.