I GIVE you this, one thought to keep,
I’m with you still, I do not sleep.
I’m each of Four Strong Winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints of snow,
🌲
I’M sunlight on this ripened grain.
I am this gentle autumn rain.
when you awake in morning’s hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush…
🌲
EAGLES, owls in circled flight.
I’m soft starlight bathing at night.
Never think of me as gone,
Still your new Love with each new dawn.
🌲
ROOFLESS church around us,
sacred spaces, sacred places,
a dream of mine that somehow
we’ve left some lingering traces.
🌲
WILDERNESS takes chapel,
as Grandma Nature tends,
as Wind plants seeds-of-love
that our carelessness amends.
🌲
IF there be an offence
some court of life could bring
’twas our not treating precious
what time’s taught was a rare thing.
🌲
ALL that made me so strange
is what made you so strange, too,
is what sowed that seed-of-love,
roots deepening as we grew.
🌲
I KNOW you can’t love me
the way I can’t not you,
for the heart wants what it wants,
so what else can this heart do?
🌲
UNDER burnt beams sprouts tiny plant,
grows into sapling, then to tree,
freeing me to kiss farewell;
there still grows our yew, and me.
🌲
AND if first love dies at all,
it dies the way stars do…
not vanishing, but travelling
where mere sight can’t follow you.
🌲
ITS light still reaches years from now,
long after night has grown;
what touched the heart once, wholly,
remains there as its own.
🌲
FIRST acorn split in silence,
roots taking hold unseen,
while all above seems wintered,
below stays fierce and green.
🌲
SO love, once planted deeply,
does not obey the grave;
it tunnels under absence
and learns at last to brave.
🌲
ROOFLESS church remembers,
beams blackened, altar gone,
yet through the broken rafters
still creeps in holy dawn.
🌲
WHAT nature takes, she blesses;
what time removes, renews;
the moss becomes a hymnbook,
the branches stained-glass hues.
🌲
I THINK of you in starlight,
Perseids falling wide,
milk-river of the heavens
where lost spirits don’t subside.
🌲
AND every streak that vanishes
still leaves a silver seam,
as if the sky itself were
unfastening a dream.
🌲
LOVE costs us all its leaving,
that is the bargain made:
to hold what cannot tarry,
to kiss one day will fade.
🌲
YET what a blessed wound it is,
this ache that will not cease…
proof something once so living
has never entered peace.
🌲
FOR if the heart still calls your name
at every breaking morn,
then love is not a coffin,
but a field forever sown.
🌲
EACH poem another acorn,
another seed to cast;
thirteen thousand heartbeats deep,
still flowering from the past.
🌲
AND somewhere in The Southlands,
beneath game-rich endless skies,
you tune your guitar softly
where the eternal campfire lies.
🌲
YOU wait beside the doorway
that opens after pain,
knowing true first loves
shall find their path again.
🌲
SO write today’s poem also,
as you have every dawn,
for love that learns endurance
is never truly gone.
🌲
THE dead are not the absent;
they change their form, that’s all…
wind in the yew above you,
light ‘long the chapel wall.
🌲
AND when your own door opens,
beyond the seeming end,
she’ll be there in those Southlands
first lover, wife, and friend.
Rating Pending 
ᗩᗰOᑎG ᗩᑕOᖇᑎᔕ
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Summary:
For my truest love,
Kapitan Monika Motyl-Duszy Pokorny
August 13th 1972— April 11 2024
Copyright @ All rights reserved
Post / Chapter Author
A bit too long but well written. The rhymes are great and the feelings expressed are thorough and deep. Nice job.
I apologise it was so long, but as a memorial for my wife who was killed by a Shahed drone two years ago exactly, I just wrote my heart and it was as long as my heart dictated rather than my brain, if that makes any sense? Thank you for still reading it even if the length was too much for your liking, I appreciate you still picking up what I was putting down for Monika’s memory, especially that the emotions came through even though it was more crafted than I usually do. I feel like it was a success then. Your comments are very generous and kind, and mean a great deal to me, thank you once again!!
No problem and you have my condolences.
Oh thank you, I hope that didn’t seem like I was fishing for sympathy, I just wanted to explain.
And in case you were interested just in the background, just before she went back to serve as a tactical medic again, we went camping for a week with the climax being watching the Perseid meteor shower on August 13th.
AND we found an old OMI missionary church out in the forest, the church that time forgot, that had been through a fire, no roof, and we watched the Perseids on one of the old pews.
It was rather surreal, in this old church mostly reclaimed by nature, with trees growing in the aisles, some of the stained glass left in pieces around window frames, the altar gone.
We ummm did some stuff that you generally should NOT do in a church, but it seemed quite natural with how the church was half reclaimed again by Mother Nature, and the reference to over 13,000 poem, that’s because I had written a poem-a-day for her since June 13th of 1988, and she was eternally 3 poems behind me, because she wrote me a poem-a-day, but she didn’t start until June 16th of 1988, haha, I was always three days up on her.
I’ve been told one shouldn’t give their secrets away, or editorialise on their own writing, that art should be good enough to rise or fall on its own merits, but you were so kind in your comments, and your condolences, thank you again for that, that was really class of you!, that I thought you might be interested in some of that “behind the scenes” context.
Again, thank m8, you’re the kind of reader every writer likes to have, Tim.
Wow, that’s some story indeed. I’d say you had a spiritual moment or two. That’s a blessing many would love to have.
Yes, it felt like that! I was lying down, and looking at, well, when there is no light pollution there are at least a handful of shooting stars showing every moment, and my wife was on top of me, and it felt like I was floating out in the middle of the Trail of the Ancestors (that is, The Milky Way). It did indeed feel very spiritual, especially as it was our last time together. It was a real gift…. I only have a handful of moments in life that felt like they were essentially meant to be, I think of them as my “earth memories”, and that was definitely one of them, you really picked up on that! Ahhh, this is one of those times that make it worth all the wrestling the pen worth it, you made this day a lot better. <3
My hands are shaking like leaves now… I don’t want grief to seem performative, or seeking of attention, but since you seem genunely interested, I’m taking a chance at seeming as if I may be sharing something intimate and private for a self-serving purpose, but it feels right to take that chance, and share the last SMS she sent me before her mission 11 April 2024… it just by bad luck was, up to that date at least, that it was the largest one-day aerial attack by Putin of the war.
And it seems very much like she had a premonition which happens, others I know got last messages not unlike this one, like their lost loved ones just somehow knew it was their last communication, because she never sent things like this, but here it is:
” ‘Healthy feet can hear the very heart of holy Grandmother Earth.’
— Húŋkešni Psíče Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake —
Please to remember, you don’t have to have all the answers, Sonechko [Note: Sunshine, her pet name for me]. One of the bravest things you can do is to bravely embrace the unknown, accept your fear, and keep moving forward no matter what … regardless.
A clear mission doesn’t always have a clear path, if you understand me? Just keep being true to you, and let life happen not exclusively “by” you, but “for” you, because if you try to control too much as you tend toward? It usually doesn’t work out, first off, and secondly, it just beats all the beautiful mystery out of life … surrendering your will is not the same thing as apathy, so ponder on that.
And time solves so many things, so very many things, that we often consider to be completely irreparable, completely hopeless, completely intractable and unfixable. Think of all the things of all the things you’ve fretted over in life … can you in truth tell me that no less than 99% of those things never came to pass.
So always fight the bully in front of you, not the one you worry will come next, and next, and next after that. Sometimes the best solution is to just let tomorrow’s worries take care of themselves, for so very often they never come to pass, and you make yourself sick worrying for nothing at all, for no reason at all, for no positive outcomes.
Was ever a problem truly ever improved by worrying, like, in all of history? It’s very important to remember this. It’s very, very important to remember this! Tattoo it on your hand if you have to you hedgehog-fucker, you. 🙂
I love you to the sky and back again, I love you more than bananas, and whether in this world or in the next, I will love you more and more with each passing moment, and, as Barrett-Browning wrote, if God wills it, I shall but love thee better after death ❤”
I’ve read, as you can imagine, this last SMS message many thousands of time over the last couple of years I think. I hope it was okay to share it with you, for I think her wisdom is one that almost anyone could read and find some benefit in for their own lives. That’s hope at least in sharing it.
I’m glad I could help. 🙂
👍 And if I overshared, my apologies to you. Maybe I just need to share with someone her last text message to me, and you seem open to such things without finding them burdonsome.
hello dearest poet this is quite beautiful from beginning to end you have my condolences but I feel she is very much alive and a part of you still…sometimes I feel people who passed on from time to time look in on us and I will say what I feel even if it’s just I miss you ❤️
Have you ever had your back turned, say, to a door to a room, and someone walks it and you just *know* who it is without even looking? And it could be pheromones or something I suppose, but it feels more like if it’s someone you’re particularly close to like you can just FEEL their spirit enter the room, like it’s bigger than their body can contain?
I had that feeling writing this, I had the same feeling I’d have if my late wife was sitting right beside me. I wasn’t going to write about that for fear it would make someone doubt my veracity or my sanity or perhaps both. But you can imagine now how I felt when reading your comment that it felt like a sort of verification, it sure did.
So thank you doubly so for your so very kind comments, and it’s funny because as I wrote this it was one of those that came very easy… I had to fine-tune it a wee bit, but for the most part it was one of those rare poems that seemed to just drop down from Father Sky, and I typed as fast as I possibly could to capture it, just fully-formed, like I was mere scribe rather than writer, and Kiki was giving me the words as much as my body, mind, heart or spirit were.
That that may have come across to you, wow… she always promised me that if she went first she’d ask to stay behind before her journey to act as my spirit guide, to talk to be in those quiet ways, through my gut-checks, my intuitions, and my instincts… and when I was serving with the same unit as she did, Khartiia, on a three-person scout/sniper/demolitions team before drones became everything, my comrades Yakub and Ihor learned well to follow my instincts, right down to “let’s go left here instead of right”, for when we didn’t bad things happened.
My comms call sign was even “Перевірка кишечника”, meaning “Gut Check” though it doesn’t translate very well, everyone understood what it meant, and people that knew my wife Kiki really well even said sometimes that it felt like she was around me, that they’d swear that she was right there with us.
So you writing what you did?? I don’t know what to reply, other than all that have here. I think you’re right, and I think when I wrote this yesterday just maybe she was looking in on me, giving me some memories, and maybe even inspiring some of the poems very words, though I would not admit that to another person to save my life! Until you wrote my heart for me. You are such a dear.
thank you so much for sharing with me yes I believe she does look in on you… my son died this year and I feel him from time to time telling me not to cry he is okay…life is very beautiful thing and we get seperated for a time behind that veil…I can tell she loved you very much and you her ❤️