The snowflakes fall,

And she steps between them,

Finding galaxies in gaps,

Hoping for the magic to touch her.

Because what’s the point,

Of finding the words,

If life doesn’t, hasn’t touched you?

I first came across Swinburne’s “A Forsaken Garden” while listening to BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please! It is one of those poems to which I return frequently and lines from which pop unbidden into my head

—

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,

Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses

The steep square slope of the blossomless bed

Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses

Now lie dead.

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,

To the low last edge of the long lone land.

If a step should sound or a word be spoken,

Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest’s hand ?

So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,

Through branches…

I have always been here, among the lonely people. Despite having people around me, my battles exist within my head and body. To you, I may look normal, but on the inside is a scene entirely different. My constant companions are sadness, frustration, exhaustion — even a fortified fortress to shield me from what the world has and could continue to do to me. Those walls isolate me from my family. The shadows are filled with creatures that know how to hurt me if I move too close. So, you see, I am one of the lonely people. But I am not alone.
Sarah Doughty)

All the Lonely People—

they converge,

invisible at intersections

of Life and Death,

strangely untouched by hands of those

simpatico.

How can it be that so many similar

do exist while lost

to one another?

All the Lonely People—

they are unalone, and yet