twins, a poem

“Fancy being shaken out of your poetic dream by the cries of twins!”
- Sir Walter Besant

twins, a poem
twins, a poem
We all wondered about that little girl
who on occasion would look out
from the second floor dormer
of that old ramshackle house
and call to us
before the ghost of her mother
would pull her back in
to the shadows.

Her father was a rough, scraggly old man,
and he only left the house on stray errands
never talking to any of us,
always a furtive scowl on his face
as he’d drive off
sometimes for days on end
returning with boxes of what
we never knew.

The day the police came
none of us should have been surprised
but, indeed, we were,
there had been twins,
two identical little girls,
lost in the glooms of that house,
where they went we never learned,
but we’ve always hoped,
some place, where the shadows flee.

---

If you liked this poem, you might like this one as well, shed light, a poem.

Thank you for reading, twins, a poem.

---

“Fate! drop the curtain; I can lose no more.
Silence and Darkness! solemn sisters! twins
From ancient Night, who nurse the tender thought.”
– Edward Young

“The warmer Sun the golden Bull outran,
And with Twins made haste to inn and play:
Scatt’ring ten thousand flow’rs, he new began
To paint the world, and piece the length’ning day …”
– Phinea Fletcher, from the poem, The Purple Island

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).”
– Vladimir Nabokov