Au Revoir Genieve - Miss G - Woollery
For a day, for a week, for a month you will be remembered
Those who knew you well
Family will always recall that you have left a void in them
The thoughtful friend for a year
May think and shed a tear
Memories are expendable like everything in time
Sun rise and sunset
Night comes and day goes
And day after day and day again changing to night
We seem to come on a whim of time
And in the coming and going of days we are gone
Those who cry long or not at all are the same
They have a metacognition of death
How shall I describe what we had
And what forever remains because I write this page
Because I well intend
The girl from Hanover who became woman amongst us
Shall not go as trivial as mere dust
We read you lady like a book that made us think
Better of ourselves, because you treated us better than ourselves
So I shall not just close you and put you on a shelf
As if you were mere display
I wanted a postlude since meeting you again
I wanted to more than dream of youth
Tattered at the edge, bone ragged too, jagged in the soul
To mend, to shape, to embroider with love again
You and I mentoring tomorrow all day long yesterday
And yesterday in the hot sun we met unmelted in purpose
And you brought me brimming with excitement
And we at the root of tree fertilized by the shade
Back and forth, back forth swung on memories
And I felt our friendship endured good, and that we are old
Dreamers in a different world with new priorities
Less eternal than before, indeed without eternity
In the heart man nothing great comes of mortality
We tongue sifted love and hate in one moment
As if prophetic that time is the climax of maliice and discontent.
Five weeks from the day we embraced again you died
For you it came in five days
The discovery of cancer, the surgery, the demise
There was no farewell just the sudden emptiness
The impotence of desire, the shrivelling power of pain
We shall not collaborate in moulding the young again
Is this how love wounds us in the plight of the irrevokable separation?
I want these words to be your memory
When the flowers are faded from your grave
I want you to have a legacy as a servant
And a reward as a queen
I place my love gently beside you
And cause this poem to mark the spot
Where you touched our lives
Where history will find you ravaged by the sorrow of years
Making rainbow for us out of your tears
Au revoir teacher, woman, sister, model wife, mother, friend
Those who cry are crazy if think this is the end
You are too great for that.
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