PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

He would have named the Heaven's very stars for her;

but she preferred some pack-mule driver's lust.

He would have made a temple out of words for her;

but she delighted in crude tavern talk.

He would have made her goddess of his whole existence;

but she sought a life a lot less like his books.

He needed too much from her, for his soul;

she needed nothing and no one that refined.

Ugly, a scholar, more than twice her age,

he was a reader of the night sky's poems.

His blood was Caesar's, and the Ptolemies'.

Shrewd sense, passion for beauty:  oh well, these

he learned from his stepfather, Antony.

Her silken-stockinged, teenaged beauty seized

the movement of a westward. mincing wind;

her blown heart begged only the mastery

that would control her, naked, to delight;

controlled---naked, submissive---to delight.

The Starwatcher watched her descend the slope

and join that mule train, ready to depart.

They never met again.  She learned, too soon,

that rugged love gives way to rugged wrath;

that uncouth lust, attractive for a while,

can also slam a fist against a head.

And satisfactions, begged as being controlled,

lead into other miseries untold.

The Starwatcher left hurriedly, that year,

with others; having seen the subtle star,

first proclaim the toddling King of Kings.

He died years later; happy, and with love;

glad to have seen the Kingdom's nearer edge.

Taken, abandoned, many times along

the cobbled roads that bore the Roman peace,

she spent her last years begging in Corinth;

until some laughing centurion broke her neck

to prove that aging whores' necks snap like twigs.

The western mincing wind blew merrily

across the temporarily pure snow;

blew merrily onward without a pause.