After “Since You Went Away”
A cycle of homecomings
_______________
I. Anne Hilton
When the war ended,
and flags drooped,
and the sky went back to its blue business,
Anne Hilton planted marigolds.
They rose from churned soil
like small suns that had forgiven everything.
The shovel smelled of rust and rain.
Each seed she dropped
was a kind of prayer,
though she never called it that.
Sometimes she felt a breath on her neck -
a soldier’s, perhaps -
and said, “Yes, I know,”
without turning.
The marigolds nodded
as if in agreement.
_______________
II. Jane
By the river,
where train whistles once were fierce,
Jane walked beneath the shimmer of absence.
Tony Willett’s voice
still haunted the air...
half song, half silence.
He had come home,
and gone again,
the way light withdraws at dusk,
still there, but elsewhere.
She learned that love can return as weather,
that longing visits
in the scent of coal smoke,
or lilacs.
Once, tying her shoe,
she looked up and thought
she saw his reflection
in the water’s quick skin.
But it was only a fish -
silver, holy,
moving on.
_______________
III. Colonel Smollett
At six each morning,
he saluted the sun.
Not duty now,
but devotion.
He fed the cat.
He ironed his shirts.
He listened to the wind
as if it were a superior officer.
When he died,
they found his medals in a drawer,
beside a single feather.
No one knew where it came from.
_______________
IV. Brig
All grown,
her voice a bell through fog,
she spoke on the radio
of waiting,
of letters,
of how the heart keeps time.
People wrote: You make me believe.
She never said in what.
Only that the world
was not finished
making room for love.
_______________
V. Anne Again
Years later,
Anne sat by her window,
the marigolds bright against the dark.
Steam from her cup
rose like a spirit.
Outside, a train passed...
the sound low and tender,
a heartbeat under earth.
She closed her eyes.
Somewhere, someone was returning.
The air smelled of soil,
and forgiveness,
and that old, unbroken promise:
I’ll be seeing you.
And for a moment -
in the stillness between kettle and birdsong -
she was.
_______________
What the War Left Behind
In those years after,
the world was still trembling.
People called it recovery,
but it was more like learning
to walk on tilted ground.
Everyone had lost something...
a name, a heartbeat,
the belief that life could be neatly mended.
And yet small things carried them forward:
the smell of bread,
a letter in a Bible,
the cat on the colonel’s lap.
Anne’s marigolds bloomed each summer,
as if they knew no other work
than to remember sunlight.
Jane’s life went on -
quiet, respectable,
full of moments when the past brushed her sleeve
and moved along.
Maybe that’s how grace appears -
not in victory,
nor in healing,
but in persistence:
the choice to plant,
to iron a shirt,
to pour tea for a friend
who never quite arrives.
The world does not owe us closure;
it gives us seasons.
And through them,
Perhaps this is what the Hiltons learned,
and what we are still learning:
that love survives in the act of attention,
that memory, if tended gently,
becomes a garden.
And that even the quietest among us
may one day lift their faces
to the evening train
and whisper -
not in grief,
but in wonder...
I’ll be seeing you.
GBS jr
2018
0 Comments