Where the Ground Gives Way
Once I took your face into my hand,
and sunlight showed the tears within your eyes;
it seemed we stood on slowly yielding land,
where something long concealed began to rise.
No word was said—yet both of us could feel
a hidden current moving from below,
as if the ground were shifting into real
depths neither one of us was meant to know.
These are the places where our spirits go,
drawn under by a force we cannot name,
where, what we are, dissolves before we know,
and leaves us altered, never quite the same.
Lovers and friends are lost to us this way,
each carried where no language lets us stay.
Scharlie Meeuws, a poet born in Germany, began writing at a young age. She studied in Spain and France, writing poems in Spanish and French before settling in England, where she co-owns Thorntons Bookshop, the oldest in Oxford. Scharlie’s poetry has been featured in magazines and anthologies, including the Guardian. Her work was recognized by Nobel Prize winner Vicente Aleixandre. Her most recent book is The Emotional Robot and Other Poems. Her poetry book Outbranching was published by Cerasus, London in 2021 and is available on Amazon.
If I’m understanding, once the ground starts to give, you don’t choose what happens next. You get carried into a deeper version of reality, and it changes both people, sometimes to the point where the relationship can’t survive it…interesting metaphor.
Thank you Michael for finding my poem interesting. Communication on human levels are
Multi-layered and hard to describe in words. I tried…
This poem is both technically skillful and exquisitely beautiful. I love the balance between what is lost and what is kept.
I enjoyed this poem. Life intervening often pulls the carpet from undr us, altering relationships that will never be the same again, sending us on different paths in time and space.
Thanks for the read, Scharlie.
I loved reading your thoughts about my poem, oh yes, those different paths in space and time we all have to choose….i love the idea of twin worlds where all outcomes are different, may be opposite from ours.. .
Sharlie, this is such a haunting image of lachrymose lament with eventual reality catching up to us. The reasons behind the decaying relationship are appropriately left to the readers to fixate on their own failures that feed “the hidden current,”
Beautiful poem.
A beautiful, finely-crafted sonnet. It conveys an ethereal sense – no dialogue, yet an intense monologue that conveys much about both the addressee and the relationship to the speaker. It also masters that quintessential poetic quality of elusiveness that disguises layers of meaning.
Thank you Adam for your lovely comment! I could write forever about these many layers of meaning between human beings. Alas, it often becomes too abstract and elusive for many…
An exquisite poem that speaks to the heart and the senses of a powerful language that has no words… yet you manage to impart the meaning gracefully and beautifully. Thank you, Scharlie!
Thank you Susan, I’m thrilled you liked my poem!
Beautifully written. I love the imagery, especially in the third stanza.