Sentimental Heart
Safe
Her heart is locked away,
Untouched by passion’s thorn,
Never again to walk on winged feet.
Hollow anxious breezes sway
Where,
Once upon a time,
She danced,
On a beautiful autumn day,
In the arms of Prince Charming
His chosen Fairy Princess;
Their future love a mere kiss away.
Regret
Tugs at her spirit
No more often than every day.
Her mind is scorched by memories
Of love, like Handel’s Messiah,
Written by God,
Translated by angels,
So mankind might comprehend
Such perfectly balanced obsession.
A lifetime gone awry,
Would she take love back?
Play the fool,
One more time to try?
Where her happiness lived
Behind brown eyes
In his perception of their lives,
Her heart is locked away
Untouched,
Safe and sound,
Never again to cry out in pleasure
Or in pain.
When the Journey Began
The rut is so comfortable
I forget that I’m in one…
Until the mud and clay
suck at my feet
and pull me down.
I gasp for breath and wonder why
as the walls of the rut
tumble down around me.
Claws spring from the delicate hands of daughters.
Even if I can’t forget the sweet children are now grown,
my heart is open to them like a mother’s arms stay
out of habit, and history, and old bonds they broke, not I.
Memories of their innocent doe-like eyes
keep me off balance,
keening with the effort of owning empty arms
with the need to rock and sing lullabies
to soothe aches that no longer need my care.
I’ve helped to make them strong
Encouraged them to let me go.
So why am I surprised they do?
Oh mother dear, see here, see here
We really don’t need you near.
Empty nest syndrome is simply so passé.
I realize I’m in the rut again,
But I can’t seem to stop the blood
That pours from my soul
From the wounds I don’t dare speak of.
(They don’t show do they?
Like the hem of a red lace slip from under your Sunday best…)
Mustn’t whine, mustn’t cry
Stick a needle in my eye
Mustn’t make them ask me why
Mother: a temporary state of being that had all the earmarks of permanence
When the journey began.
© 2007 C. Harter Amos
Parchment and Pen
Taking comfort in the parchment of my life,
I push limits toward better things.
What power beyond our lives
decides if our smiles outnumber our tears?
It’s not for you or me to know. Our guesses are only guesses,
but we write,
learning from mistakes,
taking knowledge through the next door
with us as we go.
Take life’s credit card from me, please.
Don’t let me see the total I’ve spent
in minutes
sighing against my lover’s ear,
staring at the sea to dream
or philosophize…
to love who I’ve loved and to remember that love…
Then to write of it…
“What a futile foolTo write of such things…to think…to dream… Peck-peck-pecking out words, making chicken scratches on empty pages like so many others.”
Fool I may be
That I’ve failed to learn the game, I suppose…
Did I not make a difference to anyone, you think?
Not skeptic, not stoic, not epicurean?
Does everything have to be bathed in obscurity
to be thought clever enough to earn your gold star?
My eyes must be blind
and my art a cage that must surely be a small one:
I learned its maze one inch at a time
by the feel of its edges that were once clean, and smooth,
and as sharp as any razor’s edge.
Suddenly, unexpectedly,
The edges mocked me with flaked and uneven boundaries,
the new instructions you gave me were in a language I never learned.
I promise, I felt each ridge before I threw your list of foregone conclusions away.
I won’t bloody my fingers redefining myself or my writing
because in the end, writing is not an equation.
There is no cage.
There are no boundaries beyond the imagination and the page.
And we write…
