Begley

Could you ever make room,
Standing round your well of sorrow?
Could you break that circle of mourning?
Brittle with age, but still serviceable,
And admit other foes
Who, maybe, bore the very essence
Of your heartbreak -
But, broken too, repent?
Would anything right get built
On such split ground?
Would anything hopeful stand
On plague dirt sifted
Of definitions, symbols - the clotted matter
That holds our dead closer to heaven
Than those who put them there?
Or must you stay on your bridge of bones,
Forever inviolate with rage,
With no landfall sighted either end.