49 Flowers at the crossroads

Reading:

Flowers at the crossroads

I catch a glimpse of flowers on a verge 
And come-to with a start.
‘Look in the rear-view mirror!
Concentrate! And drive with more care!’
Like other drivers passing by 
I slow down but I never can deny
A sudden shaft of sympathy
For that unknown mourner
Who put those flowers there. 
And wonder who and why.

Each time we pass it seems they’re new.
Sometimes a wreath, sometimes a cross, 
At other times a large bouquet.
Artificial flowers of course, 
Though what counts is what they say.
And by those two roads intersecting,
Choked with mud and fumes and dust from tyres 
They’ve got a slightly better chance of lasting.

But from what black pit of tears
Comes desolation to make someone
Grieve for more than twenty years?
A wife? Devastated that her only love
Once went to work and never came home -
Or would it be a mother, undone that her only son
Ended his life before she could let go her own?

A motorcyclist, it was said.
I see him at some garden gate. 
‘Bye darling! Don’t be late. 
Remember that we’re going to see…’
And that was the last time
She could use the plural ‘we’,
For by home time he was dead.

There’s no sign: ‘In loving memory…’ 
No name for one who long ago died here. 
And yet the very blankness of this anonymity
Moves me more than any shrine to the Madonna
Or Calvary I’ve come across in France or Italy. 
The sight of those rain-swept flowers
Left on a low wall year on year
Never fails to leave me with a melancholy 
And a ‘thank god’ for my own survival
From a head-on with a motor bike.
That too left a rider dying in the road.
So as I think of that unknown victim
Of catastrophe near Tavistock,
I see a woman standing rigid, trembling
While she waits for a coffin’s arrival.
In silence I drive on, troubled by fear.