I fear

To look behind over my shoulder,

To see the temporary in the pictures,

The flowers and the breakdowns,

Forgetting how beautiful, how bad,

Too far in the past,

The sight is losing ground,

The heart so sensitive and weary;

Love, the child on his way,

No seed the sower spills,

The breath hard and sultry,

The mouth embraces the lips

And scrutinizes and tastes,

Eating lips with a strawberry round.

How close the ground has come,

Days, nights too short,

All the roads and dreaming fields,

To reflect on, to muse

And missing things;

To bed down in an arch and curvature,

To blow on the little hairs around the bellybutton

And the small fluff within

Planted, a plan more or less

And never evermore so tender.

The regret about the impermanence of everything

Softly tucked in at night with an eiderdown

Of sleep and oblivion

Coming out of a little box of the pharmacist

Around the corner;

Without words and silently,

Looking only at the eyes,

Just now seeing the little crow’s-feet,

A smile is still slumbering on the face,

And it sleeps so beautiful, so peaceful:

I fear for that moment

It will be forever.

© Rudi J.P. Lejaeghere

25/06/2016