Wednesday, May 30, 2007

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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