A lock of lost love
Emerging into the half light
of a sweet winter sun,
I feel your longing
for the old life,
the one we once knew
when the earth was younger,
where we ploughed our first story
deep in her folds and furrows.
Our child remembers,
born in the dark of a cold night,
his scream the scream
of all our sorrow.
He turned seven when you left,
taken by the duty
that weighs heavy on a chieftain
with more mouths to feed
than just our own.
I cried those long nights,
turning sideways to fill the space
where you had lain in our bed.
I wept until I took your axe,
the old one propped in the woodshed,
a rusting testimony
to the love that built our home, our hearth.
Sharpening its blade with the whetstone,
then unfurling my hair from its pleated coil
wound tightly around my head,
carefully fanning the tresses
across the smooth rim
of the kitchen table you'd crafted
for me to chop and stir my herbs.
With one clean slice, the follicles
fell away to the dirt floor.
No more would you cover
your face with my locks
or bury yourself, laughing,
in the nape of my neck.
Burnt hair on the fire
smells of death.
I am stronger now,
the reverse of Samson,
a Delilah shorn, my hair gone,
yet I have more than the strength you left
in the cleave of your axe.
I heave that metal claw to our bed,
to hack and split the emptiness
into fuel for a new fire.
I am warm once more,
though I keep a lock
of our lost love
close against my chest
to remember the old life
when the earth was young
and we were fresh with spring.
SCM January 2020