It’s how she dreams
Of wholeness, of fulfillment,
And of a love that once betrayed her;
(IN A CAVE)
Where thoughts form as
Drops on stalactites, and wordless
Sighs ingeminate in unending echoes…
It’s how she copes
With loss and despair,
A careworn heart seeking
Sanctuary in cold granite sculptures,
And those matters spent of life;
Espousing her Quasimodo’s,
She animates them with what
Life has deprived her of,
Imagining [then]
Her wings carrying her
Through the entrance where light
Floods warmly, and where, at times, (when
Her spirit soars) she fancies Esmeralda rollicking
With Jolly blithely under heavens felicity with no cares…
.
And she is Esmeralda
.
(for that moment)
Dreaming
Of her Phoebus,
Of her completeness,
Of her happiness – but as always,
She is torn from the reverie somehow and
Cast back into the cave, where her weary heart weeps
From the foolishness of dreaming things that can never be…
So she pulls her knees to her chest, and as her hair cascades over her
Eyes, a wash of gray begins again to replace all semblances of color,
In a cold ground, where dying roots are fixing her immovable…

richard lloyd cederberg
1/17

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