Summer Love

Waves lap in rhythm with my heart
midnight sky bewitches, stars sing,
hand-in-hand our spirits soar
pulses dancing to the seduction
of love’s enchantment –

Tonight the ambiance possesses us
tonight boundaries have no hold
we are moon-crazed innocence
warmed by mysterious stirrings
sand shifting beneath naked soles.

(For Eugi’s Causerie Weekly challenge: bewitched. Image my own.)

Gods and Demons

My fairy-tale-heart
dreamt of an Adonis
but his countenance
outshone my dull

Found instead
a Demogorgon
divide my time
between up and down

Like Persephone
I negotiate demonic
Hades darkness
enough for me.

(Tuesdays I borrow from Twitter @Vjknutson – this one edited. Image mine.)

Love Lessons

Had a weird sort of lexicon
the man who professed
to be my dad –

Clamped in his chokehold
he’d demand words of devotion

Became inured to this dichotomy –
spent a lifetime searching for love –

Just the right balance of cruelty and kind.

(Tuesdays, I borrow from Twitter @Vjknutson.  Sketch mine.)

Birch Trees (with recording)

Strains of Tijuana Brass flood the yard
while father on bended knee tends
his garden, tiers of stone edged rows
encircling a trio of birch trees.

Father points out birches on Sunday
drives, as if the bark is sacred, leaves
whispering a secret I cannot hear –
stirs in me an indefinable longing.

My husband planted birch trees
there amongst the flower beds –
how the leaves shimmer in sunlight,
how my heart quickens, bittersweet.

Imagine Father seated there, mellow
as he was in old age, angst expended,
tyranny of parenting set aside – understand
love unexpressed dwells in birch trees.

(Watercolour image by yours truly)