Letter In the Night

"My Dearest," she had written

       somewhere on the page

             where darkness hid it now quite out of sight.

The little stub of candle,

      half-mooned upon the sheet,

             gave only just a bit of palest light.

It was all she really needed,

     not truly even wanting

            to see the words entire in their flight

Of scribbled dots and dashes,

     of blotches from her teardrops...

            No, she did not need to have it really bright.

"I'm leaving," she had written

        somewhere in the darkness,

             with letters slanting downward to the right.

But the pen had fallen numbly

        from her cramping fingers,

              finding words too hard for her to write.

So she stared in silent sorrow

        at the page that lacked the telling

              of the ending of her struggle and her fight

To keep on loving always

        as she'd thought she really could

              but found she truly couldn't...no, not quite.

Jo Anzalone  6-12-2007

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