The Goodbye
Door
When I was just a
little girl
Playing on the
threshing floor
A reflection in my
mother’s world
Was how I met the
Goodbye Door
I saw it try to pull
her up
While she screamed
and struck the air
I saw the pain as she
gave in
Through the door that
was not there
When next I met the
Goodbye Door
I had sought my own
demise
But when I tried the
stepping through
I found I could not
say goodbye
For many years I
watched the door
And the people who
stepped through
Sometimes it came
very near
And as I grew, the
door did, too
Then suddenly, it was
my turn
To greet the Goodbye
Door
And then I knew what
others knew
A heart I loved did
beat no more
I felt the pull of
searing pain
As I begged the door
to leave
I told it that it
must be wrong
And screamed for some
reprieve
When no one came to
rescue me
And my strength gave
out like dust
The gravity of grief
took hold
Ashes to ashes, truth
and rust
Trembling, I stumbled
through the door
And fell to the
ground beyond
Oh, how my heart lay
shattered there
Through the long
night ‘til the dawn
When I was just a
little girl
Playing on the
threshing floor
God came to me and
took my hand
And showed me through
the Goodbye Door.
I always feel the novice to poetry, though I love it all the same. In my mind a goodbye door might be a number of things, but when authors put such weight behind a specific metaphor as to not appear ambiguous to its meaning, I feel incapable of making the correlations correctly. But then the words wash over me, and the sense that I am understanding something deeper. If the author had meant to spell a thing out implicitly they might have just as well have written that instead. Poetry, like music defies literal objectivity, but conveys a set of things clinical observation cannot.
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