What can we say about the loss we feel when others pass from our lives, whether by choice, circumstance, or by the inexorable traction of time? We can say they are missed and not forgotten, as we struggle to remember their faces. 

The Nature of Things 

You have been gone so long,
I can’t find your face among
the motes of light on the water.
I stop, bend down and see
only turtles asleep on warm stones.

Poor memory is not my fault.
Blame the noise in all these
intervening years, the heavy
traffic of storms and documents
and the world of vivid colors
crying like animals. 

We let it all slip by and fade away
and turn our anger on the dead
and lost and everything that did not
love us well and long enough.
It’s in the nature of things
and people to move on.

The Nature of Things by Kyle Kimberlin
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

I posted an earlier draft of this poem – with a different title – on August 3. It needed a little more work.