After Losing

And what if, in the end, you lost it all?
In the poorly timed decision,
the negligent hurry,
in missing the moment for the undoing click?
What if, in a swift dazzle of technology, all
your acts and monuments fell down a drain
never to be found or known again?

Would you, then, wake up at sunrise
to find that, in spite of it all, the wattle-birds still
have their insistent call, and there still
are the honeyeaters in the bottlebrush hedge?
Would you find a familiar coffee pot on the stove,
pattering feet wandering the hallway in their sleeping bags,
and thoughts – new day thoughts – to replace the old?

Perhaps, in a moment of quiet, you might find yourself
turning to the persistence of ink on paper and scrape
some hesitant symbols, soon words, soon poems,
and see new combinations, hear new
assemblages sound, and find
in the rhythms of your pen, in
the undulations of thought, something which
perhaps could owe its very iambs,
its steady pulsations across page
to the loss that yesterday crippled you.