The writing is on the wall The letters are big and bold and you still don’t see it It could be in neon lights but you will squint and look the other way It is the end of a chapter and time to turn the page
The storybook beginning became an arduous read We got lost in the descriptive passages of someone else’s love story Refusing to read between the lines and closing the book to avoid the obvious ending
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
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
I am honored that another of my poems, “Where Do We Go From Here?” is featured today on MasticadoresUSA. Please visit their site to view it and see other fine works from our fellow bloggers. You may also read it here.
Thank you all for your continued support of my poetry. It is much appreciated.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Now the love has gone and open wounds will not heal Wanting to move on but paralyzed limbs are planted in stone
Neither wanting to make a decision Who will go first to choose freedom? Is that what it will be? Free from each other? Did we try hard enough, if at all?
Too in love to let it go and break the tie that binds Who is fooling who? The love is missing What magnetic force is in play?
Is it time to rip off the Band Aid we plastered on the cuts and bruises from angry words weaponized? Time to stop kissing better those things that won’t ever?
I will mourn each day Because he is gone You are now living in his body But you are not him You are a shadow of who he once was
You look like him But you are someone else A person I don’t know A stranger in my midst who sees someone else when he looks at me
Like you I have struggled to find the words to respond to the horror of the murder of George Floyd before my very eyes. A man who allegedly tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill was immediately regarded as a thief and killed without a trial or a chance to plead his case. Was he a threat to society? Did the police treat him this way for our own good? Absolutely not.
The irony of this story is he was killed by the knee of a policeman. If you remember it was just a few short years ago that quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem in silent protest to the unjustified police killings of African Americans. His action was quickly adopted by many players in the NFL and every Sunday we saw them all taking a knee prior to the game. Kaepernick was promptly fired by the San Francisco 49ers and was ostracized by other teams who regarded him as an unpatriotic troublemaker and he never played in the NFL again. His career was ruined for protesting and highlighting that Black Lives Matter. Instead of acknowledging what he was protesting, his critics were deeply offended by his disregard for the flag and thought that was more egregious. “Taking a Knee” as it was referred to quickly picked up steam and it was adopted by many sports personalities. They became targets of Trump and were treated despicably.
Now a policemen has used his own knee to publicly take the life of an African American. Where is the justice?
