The Guilty Girl

Based entirely on Ian McEwan's 'Atonement'.

 

The shards of lost love Trail me everywhere They cut deeply into my feet Pieces of heart-shaped pottery These fragments are obscured to all but me For I see them plainly Existing perpetually with tormented clarity Is it life? I taste the air and death of others around me But I am numbed to the essence of it all Always subsisting but never truly awake How can I be? Haunted by their extinguished desires Tears trace the contours of a ghostly face   Starting their journey plump and delirious But at journey's end exploding in sorrow unto the pitiless ground There is no peace for me Nor will there ever be Here the blame is mine Deliverance is here The lovers once called untainted happiness their own And by robbing their lives of it, It was withdrawn from mine. As it should be.