By Mike Waterson
1. I dream a conversation and a confident
Interaction of body and mind – nothing improper
But familiar, and certain.
I dream of reminiscence and spell-bound
Intuition that something tangible is rising
From the ocean dark floor beneath us.
We are as we are, as we were, suspended in
A sense of what we eternally might be
Intimations of shared mortality.
2. I dream an exchange of sorts, a passing
Of information and a shared understanding
Defines our respective roles.
Not so much muse as a cipher – a
Scarce, occasional reminder in
The moon-struck bright night.
3. I dreamt a comet passed through my soul
And burnt a deep and jagged hole
Through my faith
I’m waiting for the satellite to return
Remind me what I’ve still to learn
What I face
4. I awakened to a life in chains
Bereft of the lost and that which remains
Reminded of what I am and of grief
Forsaken by a dream of peace.
About the poem
Lost Love was written while I was coming to terms with the death of my mum in 2015 - the only person who has ever and probably will ever loved me for who I am - it hit me harder than I could have imagined, and I was having vivid and memorable, though often very sad dreams. The poem arose directly from a dream in which both my mum and a girl who I had been deeply in love with many years earlier, played an important part - and I just woke up, in tears, and needing to write, it was the first complete poem that i had written in possibly 10 years, and it came upon me like it already existed, and i just had to document it. As it turned out, not that I knew this at the time, but the lost love's dad had died days earlier. It is a poem about grief, and unrequited love, essentially, which are to my mind similar experiences at an emotional and spiritual level, the overriding feeling driving the poem is a longing to be loved, a devastating sense of having been abandoned, a deep knowledge that I will never regain what I have lost, and the beginning of the process of truly grieving, and coming to terms with grief.
- Mike Waterson
About the Writer
Mike Waterson has been a poet over the span of four decades, and used to go by the pseudonym Void Poet Soul, a name he describes as a "pretensious piss take" made up by himself and a friend as a reaction against the "false cultural desert that was the eighties." Waterson is a self-proclaimed fifty-something year old husband and father who's had a moderately interesting life, largely by accident.