The air is thick
with days gone by.
Emotions drained
nothing left to hide.
I wander these hills
seeing nothing of worth,
for the only the living
can feel the sun’s warmth,
the heartbeat of the earth.
I see you
through the smoke and mist.
I reach for you,
grasp for a life long past.
Aching to touch,
to hold,
all that is lost to me,
while watching it slip through my fingers,
dissipate into haunting memory.
We laugh,
we love,
we live life
day to day.
Never wondering what would happen
if it was suddenly
taken away.
I walk these hills
lost in grief’s crushing hold,
never to hear your heartbeat,
never to be warm.

~ © 2015 Heidi Barnes

I never really know where some of my poetry comes from. Sometimes it is a book I am reading, or a song that I am listening too. Most of the time the inspiration comes from a book I am working on. I become so engrossed in the characters that I am writing that they have to have some other way to express their emotions that won’t work in story form so it comes out in a poem. Sometimes, and when this happens the words are difficult to write, it is an emotion I thought worked out that has come back to haunt me. When it comes to grief it tends to be a little of both. What I happen to be writing at the time and a memory that pushes itself to the surface because I am using my own experiences to try and put as much feeling and emotion as I can into that particular scene. I think this one is a little of both.