The Perfect Circle

‘Time is a perfect circle

Where it ends, it curves back in,

Starting a whole new cycle

Where the other one begins,

We cannot escape our futures, nor

Much less, escape our past,

The things that we’ve run away from

Will be waiting there, at last.’

 

That’s what he said to Jennifer

As she packed her final case,

And carried it out to the taxi,

‘I don’t want to leave a trace!

I’m parcelling up the memories

That I shared so long with you,

And dropping them off at the station,

Locked forever, on platform two.’

 

And Derek had looked forsaken as

She passed out through the door,

She’d said their love was mistaken

It had gone, forevermore.

‘Don’t look, enquire, or ask for me

Or you’ll still be waiting yet,

The one thing that will stay with me

Is that I wish we’d never met.’

 

And so she passed on out of his life

A marriage of thirteen years,

A time of strife with a testy wife

And a basketful of tears,

He tried to cling to the better times

That were fading in his head,

He only knew that he loved her still,

Though he wished that he was dead.

 

When Jennifer rode away that day

She had thought, ‘At last, I’m free!

I’m going to live my life the way

That I hoped my life would be.’

She thought of her husband’s final words

As his heart began to rend,

‘Just know that I love you, Jennifer,

I’ll be with you in the end.’

 

She moved to a whole new neighborhood

And she spurned her former friends,

Went with a whole new clique of folk

Who had never made amends,

There wasn’t a single married pair,

They were all divorced, or spent,

Adrift in the dim-lit bars like her

In search of what life meant.

 

But when the news of his passing came

She was pensive for a while,

She planned to go to his funeral

And forgot for a day to smile,

He hadn’t been able to countenance

A life where his love had gone,

And left a note with a single quote,

‘I’d best be moving on!’

 

She drifted on for a few more years

In her false, gay party hat,

With nobody there to wipe her tears

As he’d done, when times were flat,

When time brought on some dread disease

And she knew that her time was spent,

Whose hand would pay for her funeral,

Not one, and nobody went.

 

They had to open her husband’s grave

That he’d paid in the years before,

When life for him had been content

‘Til death do us part,’ he swore,

And as her coffin was laid on his

In that dismal outback track,

It was then I heard but a whispered word,

‘I knew you’d be coming back!’

 

David Lewis Paget

Reviews

[alf]

Hi David. You have mastery over epic tales, my friend!!! This one is the best I have read so far! The story flows, as they all do, but this has a haunting quality that stayed with me as I read. The cycle of life . . . that's what comes to mind. A sad tale with a sad ending, two souls entwined forever. Truly a wonderful piece of writing, alf

[Jane Winters Rogers]

The Certainty of Derek's love is the powerful,yet gently so tender emotion, that in the end of the poem
( for me as the reader) closes the perfect circle bringing them together again, as of course, they should always have remained...How is it said? Jennifer left a true love for a life that in the end left her alone, with many heartaches...her man welcomes her home with him in death because she was his woman...he was her lover, husband, and faithful friend..another deeply emotional powerful poem...

[R Smith]

love that ending David, a kind of rough justice and a ghostly few words of welcome, enough for a shiver, its a really great tale and poem, thanks for the share :)

[LoveDens]

Another sad story of goodbyes. But is also the same that is very inevitable in each other's lives. Even a person who promised to be with us forever will also come in a point when that person needs to say goodbye.