Only for a moment

On that long day, when life breathed
out, silently, but forcefully, she saw
again, the dusty patch where the lawn
had sucked death, and scrabbled to

survive, speaking in a visionary
language, of where her marriage had
taken her, without knowing, that was
what was happening; fretted with

the dying green of possibility, so the
days sobbed in the unforgiving dirt
and the rains never came, despite all
of the promises - such was the way of

it, in that place of so many broken
hopes and perished dreams, whose
fate had been written, long before the
stage was set, the actors cast, the lines

written in that wavering scrawl, as
children make, even while they try
to get it right, forgetting they have not
yet learned who they are or what it is

they can do. Indeed, what it is they will
be allowed to do. Perhaps we know so
little because ignorance lessens pain,
until the moment of the last breath. And,

even then, when like hieroglyphics,
the etched stories of our existence, dress
the lime walls of our tomb, if only for
a moment, brilliant in their colour.