I sit in this familiar place,

Imagining her distant face,

Lost in the day that never came,

Struck by nostalgia’s coup de grâce.

Nothing around me feels the same.

The fall leaves question why I came.

The air moves through me with a chill,

I’ve lost the warmth of old love’s flame.

I wander streets where time stood still,

But find myself with time to kill.

I have become a stranger here,

It’s tough to swallow this harsh pill.

Strangely distant yet we’re so near.

The Old Stone House has lost its cheer.

I must move on, that much is clear.

I may as well enjoy this beer.

I wrote this as an interlocking Rubaiyat with four quatrains in tetrameter, rhyming all end words of the final quatrain which isn’t technically correct for a Rubaiyat, but it was something the late Robert Frost had done.