Stand Up & Be Counted

In the days of our beginnings when this

love was bitter born, and the infamies of lovers

was the subject of their scorn,

when the people slandered children in the

cheapness of their lives, and a man was ever

martyred to the spite of bitter wives,

we would swallow disillusion for the sake of

hanging on, to the beauty or the passion or

the love that we had known,

we would hold ourselves erect to brave the

bitterness again, for the folly and the anger

and the spite of bitter men.

 

But I held you in the country as you

faltered and you fell, in the volleys of the cynics

and our private little hell,

so we hid ourselves from everything the

world could say in spite, and I watched you

suffer slowly in the emptiness of night,

but we found it getting harder by the day to

sit and smile, for the sickness of the people

cuts and runs a ragged mile,

and the sickness of the people has the taste

of bitter bread, when you're vilified and

ostracised and wish that you were dead.

 

It they only knew that marriage has a

steady course to run, and that once that

course is over then the marriage is undone,

and that no amount of vehemence can

make a marriage last, if the love is left a

dusty memory of pleasures past,

or if once a bond thus torn apart can leave

the couple free to find happiness with others,

that's the way it ought to be,

but the sickness of the people is that

marriage always clings, feeds its bitterness

and heartache in the hopelessness it brings.

 

So we came back to the city, and we

came back to the scorn, and we often cursed

our mothers for the day that we were born,

but we carried on in silence and denied

that we were wrong, we were lovers with a

vengeance, we were right and we were strong,

though I often felt you moving in the dark

to cry aloud at the vicious dream attacks,

and at the banter of the crowd,

but you very rarely murmured of your many

sleepless nights, and I told you very little

of my own disturbing sights.

 

It was all so long ago that they can each forget

the pain that they inflicted on the lovers, though

the burning scars remain,

and to tell them would do nothing but

arouse their instant ire, till they taste their

bitter acid, or their testing in the fire,

for the choice will come to many; do we

stay in misery, do we separate to love again

and, are we really free,

can we stand the vicious malice of the

people's twisted grace, or stay miserable and

shatter every mirror in the place?

 

David Lewis Paget

Reviews

[Marie]

Marriage is hard and divorce is hard, and who's to say which is the harder?

[Tate Morgan]

I went through a divorce 5 years ago that was a long time coming I can say I did right by stretching its demise.As you say it is done.So I went on to remarry and reinvent my fun