Your daffodil
You brought it home in troubled days, when life was twisted as a maze.
It slashed the blackness with its blaze of shattering gold, its sunshine haze.
As time scraped by the light grew dim and pain consumed us from within;
The world was cruel and sharply grim. It oozed with brightness from the brim.
The days dragged on, it grew and grew and made me glow with thoughts of you;
Whatever walls you rammed us through, it filled me up with love anew.
That fateful day, it wasn’t there. The stem stood lonely, sparsely bare,
The flower hacked with ugly tear. All I did was stand and stare.
Dead and withered, the youthful bloom; I found you in the living room
Expiring in the gathered gloom. The dusk embraced you like a tomb.
The crimson circle on the floor, the knife slung by the kitchen door,
The body leaking, red and raw. The soul escaped for ever more?
I watched them while they laid you down into a bed of moulding brown,
Standing with an anguished frown. I left your house, I left your town.
I left the world we used to know to roam a world of empty woe
Where the sun died long ago, the night you used my penknife so.
Yet one memento I have still. One small hope you could not kill;
Resting on my window sill, it blooms again; your daffodil.
