Competition

First Prize

The Photograph
by David Campbell of Beaumaris, Vic

The air is still, the night's brisk chill
is banished by the dawn;
the eastern sky is blazoned by
the flush of life reborn.

As daylight breaks the red earth wakes,
the wildflowers lift their heads. ..
a mass of hues, from greens and blues
to yellows, pinks and reds.

A multitude then hunts for food
on plateaus high and wide,
at waterholes, on scrubby knolls,
and by the riverside.

But in her room no flowers bloom,
She’s lost familiar sounds;
she only hears her whispered fears,
and nurses on their rounds.

Her world is slow, she does not know
the words to greet the sun,
and in her eyes there's faint surprise
another day's begun.

She lifts her hand to understand
the morning's clear, strong light,
as if by such her sense of touch
will tell her all is right.

Her desk is there, the rocking chair,
the bookcase by the wall,
but in her view they're all quite new. ..
she wonders at them all.

She turns her head; beside her bed
a snapshot takes her eye,
then in her mind her thoughts unwind…
and she begins to cry.

She sees her son, aged almost one,
he's learning how to walk.
She sees his smile, hears all the while
his cheerful baby-talk.

She lives the day she turned away
and left the door ajar ...
a moment's stress, the carelessness
that burnt a lifelong scar.

As in a dream she hears him scream,
and then the tractor's wheels. ..
her husband's high and anguished cry .
a wound that never heals.

Her husband wept and barely slept. ..
he blamed it all on her.
Consumed by grief he sought relief,
his life a drunken blur.

In sorrow's thrall she watched him fall,
a man still in his prime,
until he died, bereft of pride...
so old before his time.

And with his death her final breath
might very well have gone,
but year by year she's always here...
her body lingers on.

As if, in time, she hopes her crime
will lose its awful pain,
so she can find some peace of mind
and learn to live again.

While once a week I touch her cheek
and tell her all is fine,
still hoping she will look at me
and somehow give a sign.

The son she lost, to my great cost,
has robbed all sense she knew
that on the day he passed away. ..
she had a daughter too.

That photograph, my epitaph,
remains beside her bed,
but she can see just him. ..not me. ..
to her we both are dead.

And thus in life, as daughter, wife,
I’ve know both bad and good,
and understand the shifting sand
on which we’ve always stood.

In time I've learned that love is earned,
and something we must give. ..
though passing' s grief is never brief,
remember those who live.