Summers without end

Inklings Of Hope

I would write love poems for you in green
ink. As the turning years would fade them to
a color of lost hope, it would pain me to know
that in your withered hands the saddest lines
might appear, full of promise and the ironies
that stand as foals in wobbly spring pens, the
new bursting fields alive in the sun, the single
red cherry plucked for your savoring along the
foreshortened length of summers without end.

Lovers embrace their tragedies every day and
we are no different. We held the letting go dearer,
perhaps, because the trick of passing through our
comingled atoms came easier for us. When my friend’s
father passed in his bed I gazed down at his broken
body. I did not think of vital processes ceasing and
becoming stilled, but rather of the lovers that once
held him as if he were a temple of devotion, the still
green poems inked in his heart never again to be read.

Joseph Gallo
July 12, 2011