A Sad Day

Dear Diary,

Try never to count the days,try instead to make the days count.

It is a sad day here in Wales as we have now heard that the fourth missing miner has now been found dead so that is now all four men who have tragically lost their lives as a result of flood water underground.

All over the country everyone's thoughts and hearts are with the bereaved families of the men whose lives were lost.

May God rest their souls.

Just a poem tonight and it seems to fit the mood.

Amber

It never mattered that there was once a vast grieving:
trees on their hillsides, in their groves, weeping—
a plastic gold dropping
through seasons and centuries to the ground—
until now.


On this fine September afternoon from which you are absent
I am holding, as if my hand could store it,
an ornament of amber
you once gave me.


Reason says this:
The dead cannot see the living.
The living will never see the dead again.


The clear air we need to find each other in is
gone forever, yet
this resin once
collected seeds, leaves and even small feathers as it fell
and fell
which now in a sunny atmosphere seem as alive as
they ever were
as though the past could be present and memory itself


a Baltic honey—
a chafing at the edges of the seen, a showing off of just how much
can be kept safe
inside a flawed translucence.






Eavan Boland