True Love – A Cadralor

True Love

Shivering, the young woman stepped outside
pulling on the toggle of her duffle coat
shielding herself from the blistering wind
Just after five and darkness had already fallen
as she headed west on the tree-lined avenue

An old man sat quietly in the corner of the café
Staring into his bottomless cup of coffee
Ignoring hunger pains, twiddling with the
hole in the left finger of his old gloves
His head filled with memories suppressed

An elegant woman sat upright with a fixed smile
He, a puffed up blowhard, at the microphone
Commanding attention with his loud voice
and phony diatribe as kiss-asses drooled
Her body ached and her mind lived in the past

A lifetime ago two kids had clung to each other
Inseparable, joined at the hip, in love
She from the house on the hill, privileged
He from the other side of the railroad tracks
His intellect and her beauty, a winning combo

The young woman saw him in the cafe, head lowered
It had been a long time passing before her call to him
Entering he looked up at her, eyes clouded, and she went to him
Her father embraced her and she clung to him tightly
He needed to know his one true love was dying


Copyright © 2021 Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing
All Rights Reserved

Bjorn is hosting D'Verse Poets and has prompted us with a form
called Cadralor.
The cadralor is a poem of 5, unrelated, numbered stanzaic images, each of which can stand alone as a poem, is fewer than 10 lines, and ideally constrains all stanzas to the same number of lines. Imagery is crucial to cadralore: each stanza should be a whole, imagist poem, almost like a scene from a film, or a photograph. The fifth stanza acts as the crucible, alchemically pulling the unrelated stanzas together into a love poem. By “love poem,” we mean that your fifth stanza illuminates a gleaming thread that runs obliquely through the unrelated stanzas and answers the compelling question: “For what do you yearn?” 

Image by Please Don't sell My Artwork AS IS from Pixabay