Once the Night
Once the summer night fell across the sky like a dark cloth,
or like a black evening dress thrown over heaven’s starry bed.
The hoo-hoot of an owl’s complaint echoed from the branches
of a maple tree in the front yard. All else was silence.
The neighbor’s unruly dog lay hushed beneath the porch.
And a gentle wind, so unlike the fierce winds of winter,
combed the leaves of the maple like so much hair.
We hid our grief inside talk about love.
You do not understand: my life always has been a puzzle,
a rune, a card player holding an unlucky hand.
You drank what remained of the red wine
knowing it was time to remember our dead.
What I meant to say is: the music of your voice filled
that stillness. And, in a moment of sudden, yet quiet revelation,
a presence I knew to be my dead father arrived to sit beside me.
There were so many words I could have used to escape
your labyrinth, your prison of language.
I lean into the hour of yet another sweet farewell.
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Myth at the End of the World
After Czeslaw Milosz
On the day the world ends
why do we talk of love in spring beside the stream
sitting one more time, maybe our last time, by a saffron bed of daffodils?
The laurel boughs lean heavy with fresh new growth.
In the light of the forest all our sins are forgiven.
On the day the world ends
Phoebus rises over the canyon behind a veil of mist.
Sunlight bestows on us its grace with the music
of Apollo’s golden lyre. Sunlight illuminates the pastel hues of sky.
We hear orioles’ sweet songs at dawn and celebrate
the bees’ swarm, daisies in bloom, and the stream flowing
to the music of the Iyre as the morning light ascends.
On the day the world ends
no one believes the world is ending
as long as fat white clouds scuttle across the pale blue
and salmon swim upstream avoiding present danger.
As long as hyacinths riot in color over a hillside,
and the magnolia sheds its blossoms in a pink haze.
No one believes the world is ending.
Only you and I, still in love and not at all afraid
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Poem Inspired by Rosemary Catacalos:
“Why I Write” in Six Quatrains
I write when a song like “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” comes to mind,+++or any poignant love song, for that matter.
I write because my fifth grade teacher
+++asked me to write my first poem.
I write out of my love for this human language.
I write because my grandmother used to plait my hair
+++into two careful braids with a part in the middle
+++as she warned me to “be a good girl.”
I write because the poems I have yet to write
+++haunt me like my ancestors’ spirits.
I write because the words “terror” and the “children’s starvation”
+++become a guilt we all will share.
I write since I cannot lie down at night
+++for fear of dying in my sleep without saying:
I write for the coming generations, for my granddaughter
+++who always interrupts. “Grandma will you play with me?”
I do not write for those who will never listen to me.
I write for the lovers who have blessed my life
+++and for the love I have yet to receive.
I write because I worship the mentors, both living and dead.
I write out of desire to be understood by myself and the Other.
Because these woods call to me with an enchantment of green and narcissus.
Because the night’s muse comes to me with her songs.
I write in the dream of a perfect poem.
=====
Love Ballade
If you are a bolt of lightning cleaving the April sky,
+++I am the hiss and gleam of its fiery strike.
If you are a magnolia tree growing tall and straight from the earth,
+++I am a shower of pink blossoms in the sultry breeze.
If you are the moon rising above the fertile loam,
+++I am a seed planted in the moist and deep below
If you are a black bear roaming the piney woods,
+++I am the innocent trout you plucked from a brook.
If you are a stag deer tracking his path through the forest,
+++I am your doe nibbling the sweet grass at the forest’s rim.
If you are a nightingale warbling a sad song from an oak branch,
+++I am grief’s lament falling upon the widow’s ear.
If you are Anansi the spider spinning your treacherous web,
+++I am the tiny insect trapped within its warp and weave.
If you are a lion in pursuit of an antelope,
+++I am that frightened desperate animal.
If you are a violin playing music by a gifted child,
+++I am a new symphony dedicated only to you.
If you are a blues chord fingered on the keyboard,
+++I am the harmony of a flatted seventh note.
If you are the measure of other men’s sadness,
+++I am the constant object of your pure desire.
If you are time passing, memory of a place blessed by Love,
+++I am the woman you remember her soul to possess.
If you are the sound of water at the foot of the mountain,
+++I am wind, water, stone and earth.
=====
Poems (c) Beth Brown Preston
Image: W.B.W. via Pixabay remixed