Poetry 2

To Watch You Leaving
by Jocelyn Galvano-Pickett
To Watch You Leaving . . .is to know such pain, it's jagged edges tearing into my soul. As a stake from the garden tears into the warm, dark earth.To Watch You Leaving . . .knowing all the while that never again will I fit myself, warm with sleep, against your solid back.Nor hear your steady breathing. Or feel the beating of your heart.To Watch You Leaving . . .aware in every moment of every day that my dreams, my future; once tied with silken ribbons to yours, will never come to be.And the mornings once so silent and hopeful, us gazing at the mountains and so gently awaiting forever - are now but small pieces of my past.To Watch You Leaving . . .your heart a tight fist of anger and your dry eyes betraying nothing of you. I cry for both of us, my love, because you will not.To Watch You Leaving . . .is to know that I've lost my place on this earth. My station. My heart's home. That I will wander, forever a nomad. Alone and afraid. And in my troubled dreams watch you leave, again and again.For the balance of my days.

Both this poem and Pablo Neruda's poem talk about the feeling of losing love, and the feeling afterwards. Galvano-Pickett uses imagery to make the abstract feeling of love more tangible. Neruda, however, used the imagery to show a lack of clarity for the feeling of love. Although their ways are different, they have a similar effect. Both create a feeling of emptiness and isolation.
In both of the poems, the speaker still loves the person they're speaking about, but the speaker in Neruda's poem is trying to forget his love, the speaker in Galvano-Pickett's poem seems to be dwelling on it her love a lot more, talking about how in her mind she will be watching him leave again and again. This is probably because the break-up happened more recently in Galvano-Pickett's poem than in Neruda's poem. The speaker in seems to have come to terms with what happened a little more, and has put most of it past him, although there is still some degree of longing for the way things were.