Like a young child, who to his mother’s door
Runs eager for the welcoming embrace
And finds the door shut, and with troubled face
Calls and through sobbing calls, and o’er and o’er
Calling, storms at the panel, so before
A door that will not open, sick and numb
I listen for a word that will not come
And know, at last, I may not enter more.
Silence! And through the silence and the dark
By that closed door, the distant sob of tears
Beats on my spirit, as on fairy shores the spectral sea; and through
the sobbing hark!
Down the fair-chambered corridor of years,
The quiet shutting, one by one, of doors.
The song is dedicated to the memory of Ron Hendricks,
who died by his own hand when AIDS took away all hope.