Your Echo Comes from Long Lost Time
…….
……………..
Your echo comes, reverberating from
Lost hours, those twenty thousand days betrayed
By absence, nights whose sweetness will not come
Now, never be redeemed. Not even grayed
Out since they never smelled our mingled breath,
These decades are the fetuses removed
Before they had a heart and blood, had death
Exclusively for love, their ends approved
By banishment of you from me. I feel
Your stomach spasming against my own
That parting hour, a pain without appeal,
Two men in grief together and alone—
..A ricochet of agony and tears
….From deep to deep across black years.
Charles Randall Stanfield