Misty Memories OR Time, No Final Curtain

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

An earlier version of this poem  appeared in Poetry Monthly magazine (April 2007) and subsequently in my collection, Accomplices to Illusion, the same year; it was written with a friend in mind, but also for the many thousands of people diagnosed with dementia and their carers to try and give them some encouragement and help them through the early years of what is a heart-breaking condition

My friend rarely indicates that he recognises me now, but his friends and family know the person who is my friend is still there, inside the person he has become, because every now and then he finds a way - if only fleetingly, through the ever thickening mists of dementia - to tell us so. 

Time, even unto death and beyond, has neither remit nor power to erase living memory altogether, especially where love is concerned.

'Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.' - Oscar Wilde

“That I shall love always,
I argue thee
that love is life,
and life hath immortality”
- Emily Dickinson,  That I did always Love

MISTY MEMORIES or TIME, NO FINAL CURTAIN

Let life be painting pictures on the heart

for the soul’s grasp forever to retain,

so the mind’s eye, less clear than at the start

and peering through mist,can enjoy again

Though memory’s jigsaw, it may fall apart,

fitting the pieces, we make bad choices,

the mind’s ear, if less clear than at the start,

is still listening out, hears love’s voices

Our finer senses, heart and soul shall hone,

if seen to work in mysterious ways,

so Memory, though fair stripped to the bone,

to the inner self stays true all our days

Though we be taken for but shadows in a mist,
we know better whom love has ever kissed

Copyright R. N. Taber 2004; 2019

[Note:The dinal couplet of this poems was revied, May 2020.]