The Rueful Heart

You can grope all night for the one true rose
or swoon alone for free without embrace—
what moves the heart to heartbreak
will always make the petals close.

You can flee, you can hide between the beats of heartbeat,
you can turn bright eyes aside from love's dark fate—
but what can move the rueful heart
When you neither love nor hate?

Who can you trust, which way turn, when
dreams like dizzy rockets cross and crash,
flinging you down to earth so stark
amid a churn of char and spark?

(What turned lightning's stroke
to pale blue smoke at dusk
may yet turn love to dust
that blows away and leaves an empty husk.)

Here now you see how rivers
running fast and slow divert and dry.
Hear now these lovers running down cry "Time!"
when shadows veined with red run wild and stain the eye.
What For, they cry, this flash
and spark and manly flutter?
For What this smooth and supple
marbled flesh of womankind?

The old, the young: embrace, disclose;
desire the flesh, the flame, the rose;
Your dreams, your flesh: aspire, perspire—
but every year it takes more pain to reach the fire.

What then? What's wrong? If time
that held your heart enthralled so long
holds no hope but this at last,
this vexing gall at all that's past,

if waste that chewed itself to numbness
lives but to taste this morbid tongue again,
if haste that chased it's tail to madness
now flings and flays and flails itself again,

then hearts that rue such motion
Here now must still these throes.
Now lovers running down cry, "Time!"
Which only makes the petals close.


rcs.

4th draft: 12/06/03
©1986 Ronald C. Southern

Mary's Child

There must have been
Some days when she forgot,
When the child was only a child—
Not that epiphanal flash sprung forth
Like an arrow from the bow of God,
But only a plodding child
With an affinity for dirt.

She must have stood
Some days in the doorway
Concerned with his mortal hurts,
Watching with a mother's eye
As his naked feet went pounding,
Sounding with a child's quick beat,
Through hard and narrow earthbound streets.

There must have been
Those days when she forgot,
But soon she would remember
And know it every day
That each passing day he became
More and more like an arrow
Returning to the heart of God.

rcs.

4th draft: 08/12/01
©1980 Ronald C. Southern

I Might Like

"I might like all of my lovers to come back for a visit,
I've always thought that would be a lot of fun.
Still, I might be mistaken--I sure wouldn't
Want them all to get together for a chat."

rcs.
2nd draft: 04/08/07
©2005 Ronald C. Southern