Those I Waved Goodbye To.

There comes a point when memory feels less like looking back and more like standing among ghosts who never truly left. This poem turns toward them with recognition (not grief) tracing the faint, eternal gestures between those who go and those who remain. It is about the quiet grace of waving, and still feeling the hand that waves back. About knowing that what we’ve loved is not gone, only curled gently into time.

Now it is that I am older,
I recall when I was bolder.
Young and drunk on unbound visions,
smashing through all heart’s collisions
Dancing, chancing,
chasing something;
hurrying, scurrying yet –
always one thing left behind,
to wave goodbye to.

Forever yearning, for that place
of mystery on the mirror’d face,
where tiny jewelled smithereens
could coalesce as snowflaked dreams
and somehow make a wondrous whole
from all the shattered bits of soul
I left in caves and cold, dark coves
where hopes were cast by waves of loves
I’d waved goodbye to.

With smile and jaunty attitude
concealing deeper, darker moods
I ventured then to find my ghost
‘mongst eyes and ears of elder folks
whose fingers, gnarled with pointed nails
poked my shame and lifted veils.
In earnest did I dig and search
for treasures deep beneath the hurt
for those I’d waved goodbye to.

I found a hell in paradise,
choked on perfumed candlelights,
heard music cawed by hawkeyed crows
whose peck-peck, amplified the throes
of victims, saints and witches too
who cackled loud above their brew.
Stirring, whirling, casting spells
while I tried bravely to rebel
with – those I’d waved goodbye to.

Reduced, pathetic, now archaic
blithe alone ‘mongst whispering relics.
Mem’ries strive to hold their own
fractured, starved and wracked by storm
Antiquated, grey and buried as
time steps t’ward when I’ll be ferried
across the Styx where all souls blend
where I become you and you become me, my friend
I waved goodbye to.

And yet each wave I give is met; somewhere a hand, unseen, is set to mirror mine through the years, to calm my heart and still my fears.

The air remembers every sign, each gesture tucked into its time. It’s not goodbye, but soft reply,  the grace of waving, and knowing why. For in each face, a piece of me,
woven threads of what used to be.
And every farewell, is a gentle guide,
that’ll bring me, unafraid, to where souls reside.