The Wall - Anonymous Poem by Nadine Wind

Their wedding picture mocked them from the table

These two whose lives no longer touched each other.

They loved with such a heavy barricade between them

That neither battering rams of words

Nor artilleries of touch could break it down.

Somewhere between the oldest child's first tooth

And youngest daughter's graduation

They lost each other.

Throughout the years each slowly unraveled

That tangled ball of string called self

And as they tugged at stubborn knots

Each hid their searching from the other.

Sometimes she cried at night and begged

The whispering darkness to tell her who she was

While he lay beside her snoring like a

Hibernating bear unaware of her winter.

Once after that had made love he wanted to tell her

How afraid he was of dying

But fearing to show his naked soul he spoke instead

About the beauty of her breasts.

She took a course in modern art trying to find herself.

In colors splashed upon a canvas

And complaining to other women about men

Who were insensitive.

He climbed into a tomb called the office

Wrapped his mind in a shroud of paper figures

And buried himself in customers.

Slowly the wall between them rose cemented

By the mortar of indifference.

One day reaching out to touch each other

They found a barrier they could not penetrate

And recoiling from the coldness of the stone

Each retreated from the stranger on the other side.

For when love dies it is not in a moment of angry battle

Nor when fiery bodies lose their heat.

It lies panting exhausted expiring

At the bottom of a wall it could not scale.