Reading

The medium says it is a past-life connection;
two lives, she amends, at least two.

This, my life to mourn you,
to work through that other life

in which you died, a soldier, writing letters
from a border, and I never found a way

back into daylight. Needless to say,
this was not the good news I had hoped for.

I thought she’d offer something
conventionally hopeful, direct me

to a trap door I failed to see.
There was victory in the form

of wands or swords, I couldn’t say which.
An end to grief so utter, I’m the mouth

it speaks with. It was us before this life,
...