The Seer

They sat around the long table: her parents, grandparents, and younger brother, ignoring her.  She made tea and toast, settled into the window seat, and quietly watched them.

Eventually, her brother glided towards her, arm outstretched, inviting her to join them.  She shook her head.  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.  ‘I’m just not ready to die.’

© Gill Dunstan
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Regret

Neither Jealousy, hunched in a ditch,

Scrutinising that face,

Nor Envy in high branches,

Downwards-looking, quantifying that.

No one sets Regret clattering,

Yet, like a star, it burns more brightly,

The instant 'what might have been'

Is expelled from the sky.

Like Etruscan ancients we trawl the past

Mapping the flashes of our stars.

© Wendy Vacani

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"I'm so sorry, Mrs Pratt"

Brand new, you say?  Well, if Britney had hung her coat up on her peg as she's supposed to, it wouldn't have got mixed up with all the other garments brought in for the collage, would it?  Yes, I appreciate she's only five - but how were we to know? And it does add a lovely splash of colour up there on the wall..."

© Sheila Rogers
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Woman in the Mirror

I see her post-war childhood
stilled in the freezing of her age,
lifting, melted up
to the surface of her skin,
as the passage 
of her years slips past.

Paths unexplored,
her eyes avert
lest the wound of
bitter regret
taints the stumbling
half sight of old age.

© Valerie Taylor
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Regret

I don't regret
things I should have done,
poor decisions,
words best unsaid,
if I have made amends,
apologise,
learnt lessons from mistakes.

How different those
where ruthless time has driven on
and like a hit-and-run, left carnage
in his wake - but all's too late to change.

Then painful, futile guilt,
like a wild dog worrying a bone,
eats me - and nothing can be rectified.

© Gill Dunstan
All rights reserved 

Visitors

Regret is the man left standing
at her front door, locked.
Sadness, his cousin, slithers
across the threshold on dark days
to foment with Worry and Doubt.

Wide-armed is the greeting 
for Hope and Felicity,
the welcome as warm as
her freshly baked bread.

© Helen McIntosh
All rights reserved