The Sadness Of This Afternoon

The sadness that, this afternoon, pours over me, settles like a dark cloud, watched as it descends, inexorably, becoming heavier as it encloses me, blotting out all thought - where do you come from, sadness? where are you taking me? do you have a purpose? and will I ever know what you intend? do you come to me, or have I secretly come to you? dragged my heavy boots to this dark marsh? am I to welcome you, as if some long known friend who comes slowfooted, bearing an uncomfortable truth – ‘you won’t like to hear this, I know… but as a friend…’? or are you some bitter enemy, whose only way of stealing what I am, is to leave me flaccid, wearied, slumped into the chair a backbone without spirit, naught but sorry flesh? or do you have a secret spell, which like a fairy tale I only have to speak, and zap! you’ll vanish whence you came… And look up there, there’s movement in the sky and edging round the cloud, a rim of light… or are you like a children’s birthday trick, conceived with excited giggles in the other room, a bundle made of old brown paper, dirty newsprint, knotted string, which, shed, reveals some little gift they knew would tell you of their love more warmly than a shop-wrapped parcel with its ribboned neat rosette? sadness, you shrank immediately I named your name; now I’m laughing at you, like some old friend who steals up on you, bored and dreaming in some queue, to give you then, that gentle shock of love; and after you’ve gone, sadness, I may remember something valuable.