Where Forget-Me-Nots Grow
Like river mist softening the far bank from sight,
The details grew distant by slow degrees of white.
The names thinned away like the last autumn leaves,
Loosened by rain from the skeletal trees.
Yet under the silence, where dark waters flow,
The roots of our love still deepen below.
For memory lives not in thought alone,
But in all that the heart has tenderly known.
The touch of a hand that was steady and warm,
The hush of a voice in the wake of a storm,
The scent of damp roses that climbed by the gate,
And the kettle left singing when evening grew late —
These linger like wood-smoke that clings to the air,
A life moving softly through all that is there.
Though pathways grew tangled and hard to retrace,
A quiet light still shone within every face.
Sometimes thoughts flickered like matchlight in rain,
Bright for a moment, then distant again.
A story would bloom, then loosen and fray,
Like petals caught up in the pull of the day.
And names slipped away like birds into sky,
Startled from branches as winter drew nigh.
Yet somewhere beneath all the wandering mist,
The soul kept its shape of the love it had kissed.
And those whom we cherish are never truly gone;
They move through the earth and the hush before dawn.
They live in the rain ticking soft on the glass,
In the scent of wet soil and long, bending grass.
They rest in birdsong at first break of day,
In moments of stillness that steal breath away.
A movement. A fragrance. The turn of the air.
The sudden, strange feeling that someone is there.
So I walked the old pathways where forget-me-nots grew,
Through banks dressed in silvered and rain-heavy blue.
Their petals held colours the morning sky wore
Just moments before the sun opened its door.
Five delicate blossoms around golden light,
Like small blue lanterns still burning at night.
Thin veins traced each petal, so fragile and fine,
Like rivers unfolding across space and time.
And kneeling beside them in cool morning rain,
I thought of how love outlives sorrow and pain.
How even when memory loosens its thread,
Something more constant and gentle is left.
Not held in the mind that grows weary with years,
But carried in gestures and laughter, and tears.
In hands that were held.
In songs once sung low.
In all of the tenderness, grief comes to know.
Perhaps every flower that opens in spring
Carries a fragment of those who took wing.
And maybe the breeze through the green, bending trees
Still bears the soft echo of lost memories.
Not lost in the sense that the world says we part,
But folded forever in spirit and heart.
For those whom we love leave a warmth when they go,
Like sunlight remaining on stones after snow.
I think of the mornings so silent and fair,
The cool, silver hush of the dew-heavy air,
The trembling of petals awake in the rain,
The peace that arrives after seasons of pain.
And there in the stillness, so gentle and true,
The forget-me-not quietly came into view.
As though from beyond all our sorrow and strife,
It bloomed with the whisper: Love outlives this life.
So when grief settles soft as dusk over fields,
And memory seems like a door that won’t yield,
Look close at the places where wildflowers grow,
At the blue threaded quietly through earth below.
For love leaves its mark in the smallest of things:
In rivers, in rainfall, in birds on the wing.
The blossom remains though the seasons may fly,
And love, like those flowers, does not truly die.