My life on screen again
Your beautiful mind
With odd quirks that brought
Both joy and suffering,
But mostly suffering
Together in those places
Where I could not come
With you, those shadows
In the night you met
Whose reality was only yours.
Bettie Anne Doebler is retired from many years of teaching English. She now devotes herself to writing poetry. Thirty of her poems have been published in a book, Book of the Mermaid, and in 1994 she published a book of literary criticism, "Rooted Sorrow:" Dying in Early Modern England. She has suffered from strains of depression, both in her family of birth and her own close family, particularly with the suicides of her daughter and her husband.