Speaking in Loneliness
The last orange embers of sunset have expired and the flowers stand colourless and wan. They are in mourning, pining for their foregone grandeur. They appear so bereft in their feeble attempts to please the unfriendly blackness, which stands in lieu of their radiant solar muse. This imposing spectre strikes all colours dead by its cold and inert gaze, and the flowers are helpless and moribund.
The fountain which uttered soft poetry all day in concert with the bees and birds and other music of the afternoon now sounds so affectingly maudlin, speaking in loneliness to a vacant grey, attempting to muster the cordiality and cheer to satisfy an inner need for bravery in love when the only available interlocutor is gloom.
The hall is lit with crackling hearths and paraffin lamps and the maids have done the rounds, but the silence is thick and daunting and the empty rooms sigh in their cold vacancy. The Lord is lost in his accustomed infirmity, talking to himself in interminable loops, muttering like an idiot to no-one and everyone, while the moon smiles smugly and the stars refuse to shine.
And I am here as the nightshades stretch and grow, perusing a kaleidoscope of introspection, while demons from the land come to haunt me, from across the grass and across the dell, tempting me to damnation by the door of loneliness.
I can hear the nightjars speaking gossip in the trees and I know by the darkening hour and the bleakness of the age that I will arrive in the same pitiable paralysis as the Lord, descending in a glut of lamentation and lost dreams to likewise speak to myself in interminable gibberish, to the extent the maids politely smile and defer and go about their business, keeping everything running smoothly, with the bedclothes neat and the linen well pressed…
adamdaniel 