GOODBYE FOR NOW

(For John O’Donohue)

After the storm, and the sideways bluster of the rain,
after you had opened the door in the falling light
and stood upright in the shelter of the dripping thatch;
after the goodbye and the tears and the turning away,
there was that far, horizontal, ocean gleam across
the threshold of the West as if keeping the dark at bay,
a last farewell after your Wake, not a closing but an
invitation, not a last light but a glimmer of a meeting to be,
something that had happened before and would happen
again, seen now in the light of your going as the sheer,
miracle and gifted ordinariness of evening light, something
I realized you were now wondering at through my eyes,
something we were now seeing together from that invisible
foundation that waits on the other side of sadness,
something that had once been shared and would be again,
and then from the bright falling nowhere in the center
of the dying sun, a risen thought, almost spoken
between us, ‘goodbye for now’, and you, raising your hand
as if you’d see us again, making a way through the waves
and the sea-light, and the distant miles, into the west.

GOODBYE FOR NOW

From

THE BELL AND THE BLACKBIRD
Poetry by David Whyte, April 2018

…

Leaving the Island
Photo © David Whyte
Inishbofin, Connemara
July 2015