For D'Verse Poetics: Ceremonies for Late Morning....

Digital Photograph by Walter Smith 

Ceremonies for Late Morning

The hands should be an extension

of the heart,

as in the laying on

of love and soothing;

And the heart, a gypsy vagabond

wandering in gardens across

the world,

savoring the breeze from

a Calabrian balcony,

Shielding itself beneath

the parachute of an open wild rose

to view the horizon,

the sapphire sea.

Beauty glitters there eternally,

where Homer made camp

with his storm of shaggy hair,

where since, one adventurer

and then another has made her wary way:

Oh, the gusting expatriate soul.

The eyes must always follow

the heart’s suit

and thus their moistening

upon remembrance,

The hands dancing over biscuit dough

in the crystalline morning.

Ii

My mouth cries out in my sleep.

I didn’t know it was my mouth

that formed the vowels of anguish;

I didn’t realize it was my hair

hanging in white tendrils

against my cheeks.

Who carried the records

of lost amore in a bandana

on a stick,

A book of losses colored in

by a child?

Who did I see—

much of me gone

with the low scudding cloud-cover,

The tumbling thickets of thorns

whirling toward the highway south,

in the arms of the vagabond wind.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012