Crumpled Love
There are so many ways to crumple
and the lines that persist when smoothed out
turn to cracks, rivers when wet
so that a landscape forms,
grows vegetation, supports life.
It's in the time it takes to do all this
that there’s a wasteland.
Children don’t think this
when it happens to parents, they
just feel, make it their own, mixed
with their multi-coloured imaginations,
the pictures come out sepia.
It takes a life-time of crumpling
to understand that love was there,
in hands, meals, shelters,
cuts cleaned and bandaged
even without the kiss;
to see that crumpled love takes odd forms-
harm not done, twenty-dollar bills
pickups from the bus station,
a tear at the presentation of a rose.
- © Carol Casey 2020
Carol Casey lives in Blyth, Ontario, Canada. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Leaf, The Prairie Journal, Synaeresis and others, including a number of anthologies, most recently, Much Madness, Divinest Sense, Tending the Fire and i am what becomes of broken branch.
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