Fertile Ground

I wrote this about a year ago.  In between my first marriage and my second one, I had a torrid, passionate, flame-out affair that sometimes still stuns me with the level of ferocity and pain it enabled.


When I think about how we could have been
how we should have been
I realize instead how we would have been

Five years on
the pain has dulled
the confusion diminished

but every so often
something will remind me
of you or us

and the recriminations
and the what-ifs
and the whys

spill to the surface again
an underground spring
flooding a desert

until, thinking of how we could have been
how we should have been
leads to realizing how we would have been

And the desert drains
leaving behind fertile ground
for a new life
to be lived.

(c) 2012 Drew Nicholson