Bitter Regret

Nature may be the supreme
commander of all that is,
yet she accedes on occasion
to her minor assistants. Take,
for example, Dame Fortune,
whose favour or withholding
appear outside Nature's pattern
though they are each placidly
indifferent to the entreaties
they are subjected to, by those
appealing their endowments
or their fate. Pity the woman,
in the fading quadrant of her life,
bitterly considering the waste
of her free choice. Choosing to
tenderly nurse her husband
through the long, morbid agony
of the dread disease that succeeded
in ravishing his body, his mind
and his will to endure, until he
welcomed the Angel of Death,
another of Nature's helpers. While
she, spurned in death as she was
in life, resents and regrets her
wasted life with a vile, balefully
abusive man leaving her destitute
of years, of fond memory.