Inspiration for the Spirit

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Home / Susan Dane Setin / Going

Going

by Susan Dane Setin

melting faceYou needn’t stay my darling.
Love, like trees, marks time in rings.
A petal falls in a silent dusk.
Nostalgia wells for the gone by.
Even as we live the day we see
the album pages being turned.
This then was my life: So much light
flickering on an incandescent screen.
Or perhaps a blue screen creates
the images, the special effects
of having been or having
thought one was. But you
need not stay. Your parting
only states the obvious—
what I learned shortly after
starting this whole long story.
To be or not to be is neither choice
nor stage; the or in fact, an and.
For everything that is, is someday not.
The emptiness it leaves waits
like a child, looking this way and that,
not understanding, refusing to believe.
But your going changes little.
What was, though gone, still is.
Love happens in the space.
Life is everything that can’t be said.
If the rain is gentle, it all seems clear.
In the rain, we remember everything

Copyright © 2001 Susan Dane Setin • All rights reserved.

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"What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things"—Erica Jong

Featured Poem

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Taffeta Torn Through

By Susan Dane Setin

We look for strong arms
to carry us. None forthcoming.
Or they come and go and
leave us more depleted in the going.
We look to find ourselves in the other,
always turning ’round the other
in pink taffeta, little girl pirouettes,
all grown up and still
twirling for him, as if some coyness
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