Aching Hearts

I hear them in the night:
The hearts crying with the pain.
They have forgotten the assurance of trust.
Due not to not giving it,
But due indeed to giving it forth in abundance.

They cry in the night, those hearts.
I know not what to do to quell those pains.
I pick them up as if babies,
I rock them, but it helps them not.

I turn away.
Their pain is too strong,
I'll come again in the morrow.

I push my way into the room with the crying hearts,
but I hear no wailing,
no crying,
no whimpering,
not even a snuffle.
I allow myself the briefest moment of joy,
Joy that they may well been healed by time,
But as I look in a bed that they had laid,
I knew this not the case,
As they did not lay there now,
but only their pieces.

Try as I might,
I eventually admit,
over my beard long and gray,
That I had not when I first started,
That these pieces, no longer fit to one another,
and these hearts would never be whole again.