MORE SONGS
OF THE INNER GIRL...
I.
One phone call and my life is rearranged.
Two arguments about two dates not kept
And four years spent together end in smoke.
Three people look around, and all is changed.
Committed to each other, they both slept
With other men, unwritten and unspoken
All the rules that kept them unestranged.
Then came the third, a man who long had wept.
Embraced at last, he fell -- that fall no joke
To him or to that first love, now deranged.
The mad conclusions to which he now leapt
Brought crashing down those hearts to which love spoke.
Tectonic plates should drift, not fly apart;
But they are earth, and this, the human heart.
II.
One phone call rearranges all my life.
I know my rival, not my rival, felt
That freedom was the key, and being free
Meant both could act is if they didn't care.
The situation never seemed so rife
As when I blundered in and my heart melted
Though my heart was not the first of me
To heat beyond all measure, past repair.
I heard them both hit hard, and twist the knife;
With love, one might have yielded, one have knelt.
I felt both failed, insisting -- failed to see
That pride was their destruction, laid them bare.
But oh, when he called keening, my poor heart
Could only melt again and take his part.
III.
Does my love know what his love meant?
If he can't see, my heart is doomed as well.
Yes, love can give and give, indeed it must,
But it must also know that when it's spent,
It may then call for help in turn, its spell
Cast on that other heart; it's only just,
Though each be free to follow his own bent,
That no love should become an empty shell.
How could my love not see? Was it all bluster?
His heart's walls so fortified, so fenced
About with thorns, that heartbreak ne'er befell him?
Heartbreak left to those of us who trust?
Oh, tell me that those walls can open wide --
So my heart may yet find a home inside.
.
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