The Ofi Press Magazine

Poem by D.J. Hamilton (USA), Featured in Issue 22.

Image courtesy of Liliana Perez (Mexico)

 Shadows and Fog

If all of life were but one week / And our love a single day …

Our love was not a summer day

among Norway’s isles, fiords

and endless light that never dies

though the sun has gone.

Our love was not a winter day,

cozy and warm beside the fire. 

Happily snowed in, happy with nothing

to do, no place to go, and no one we cared to see.

Our love was not a payday

despite the obvious rewards

after long patient waiting,

and incomprehensible withholdings.

Our love was not a national holiday.

Despite the noisy nocturnal celebrations,

the fireworks, the oft repeated pledges

and periodic declarations of independence.

Our love was like the first day of school.  

We shivered like school children,

in anticipation of all we would soon discover,

smiling and proud of our shiny new things.  

But no, our love was not

the first day of school

though there were hard lessons learned,

and many pencils broken.

Our love was this:

A fog-bound day in a sleepy seaport town,

with empty wharves waiting

for boats that never came

low foghorn moans of passing ships

we knew were there, but could never see.

The damp cold cut through every coat,

freezing our flesh as if naked.

The faint light, neither day nor night,

casting shadows we saw in the fog.

Shadows that were never

what we had imagined them to be.