The God of Forgetting
The agony of long slow summers as a child
These moons we wait as winter
watching old stumps of trees
& the long fall of summer in the back mirror.
The sun turns to leaf
and childhood slows
hour by hour.
We would watch the
clock on its cold black cord
swinging as if gathering
each passing minute like a Sunday mass
to spend when time sped again.
Each quiet second rings
with intense white heat
& silence slips like a knife
between the burned out frames
stacked like shelves
we could never fill.
I would imagine crows pecking
at the window — how dark things
can come to eat one’s suffering
like all those salvations
& Hail Marys
I was too young to comprehend
until finally we were flamingoes
washed clean of
Remembering which, like Love, is a god
a necessary thing, just like
for a time Forgetting is.
I wonder how memory grows roots
but the darkness that came calling
was my answer
the descent and the falling
again and again.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
