Love Eternally Day 14

heaviness of time
on lichen covered gravestones
a lover’s name fades

Kim M. Russell, 29th October 2018

Leaning

My response to Carpe Diem’s Autumn Retreat 2018 Love Eternally

It’s time for Carpe Diem’s Autumn Retreat, a period of 30 days to write haiku or tanka every day on a specific theme: ‘love eternally’.

9 thoughts on “Love Eternally Day 14”

  4. stunning – and I like how you’ve chosen to look at love from the “loss” point of view – it works well for the “zen” concept or everything must cycle etc. – and the choice of the stone, weight, etc. really just adds a potent emphasis here.

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    1. Graveyards are such interesting places, peaceful and full of stories. Some of the inscriptions are intriguing. My favourite one in the UK is in London, Highgate Cemetery, which is full of famous people and stories, romantic, weird and downright spooky. The most famous one is of Elizabeth Siddal, the model for John Everett Millais’s famous painting of Ophelia. Lizzie died of a laudanum overdose after she gave birth to a stillborn child in 1862. Grief-stricken, Rossetti, for whom she also modelled extensively, placed the only copy he had of his many poems in the coffin, lodging them in Lizzie’s luxurious copper hair. Over time, Rossetti became fixated with retrieving the poems. Her coffin was exhumed in the dead of night and Rossetti and his agent Charles Augustus Howell rescued them. Howell later observed that Lizzie’s body was unusually well preserved and her famous hair had continued to grow so that her coffin was overflowing with those lustrous copper locks.

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      1. whoa! now that is one “weird” spooky kooky story – but energy, which is light, which is love, I suspect, can cross lines, veils and boundaries, that we, as humans, can’t begin to understand. So that is fascinating. And odd. I can imagine them in the dead of night, exhuming, and hearing the rustling, and feeling the energies wavering in the dark – not all of the buried are actually at rest. But I can also understand the compulsion, the need to retrieve something so precious, – which, unless one is an artist, writer, poet etc. any “sane” person might not be able to understand. But of course, I wouldn’t be willing to go that far! LOL

        Generally though, graveyards are fascinating places, especially the really old ones.

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