Star Crossed Couple

  

 

They could not meet.

Could only make believe,

He not knowing where she wandered,

She not knowing where he walked.

Both lived in illusion,

Lived in a ring of illusory light,

Their thoughts falling like snow

Flaking from winter’s freezing sky,

Halting in vacillation

As snowflakes often seem to do,

Knowing not quite what to do.

 

Not to lose all mirth of mind,

He plunged into activity;

She, pining from the heart,

Was active too.

 

When fate or fortune let them meet

They quickly had to part.

But he, like the good ‘Romeo’ he was,

Had poured onto paper, for his ‘Juliet’,

All his heart’s pain and love.

“Show me,” said she, “Show me again,

Show me more to keep open the door

Of my heart’s love to you.

Then will I forgive you, only then,

For all this madness

You have made me live through.”

 

Thus they met.

In despite of angry tutelage,

Frail experience and poverty of youth,

Under the tyranny of age and the sway

Of circumstance and at the mercy

Of those commissioned to

Bend them. Break them if they would not bend.

 

Thus they met.

The sport of envious gods,

And bore the cost. And lingering

On and on, the heart of each cried out:

“How long? How long?”

 

Thus they met.

With the whole paraphernalia

Of frustrated love: the trysting places,

The warm embraces, the fleeting kisses,

Her yielding softness, his male assertion;

High soaring flights of fancy;

Desperate designs for

Some futile, rash expedient; the warm, wet

Saline excess of her tears;

His exasperation of being

Neither boy nor fully man.

Despair hung dark upon the air.

 

Thus both clung tight

To the flotsam and jetsam of love’s

Wrack and ruin even before

The star crossed, broken vessel that they sailed

Had started out to sea.

How they clung to those few

Soothing moments of their mutual expedition!

 

And they brought all along

In their train: domestic conflict,

Pride of warring bloods, threats

Of familial rejection,

The general disaffection,

In short,

The meagre profit of that pitiful harvest

Of good

In a year of constant blight.

 

Death is death to all design.

Their mortal pact, or fatal mischance

Cast a cloud over many a plan and intention.

For they brought home

An unwanted social affiliation

In the turbulent wake

Of  their new found folly.

 

A seed was sown

That took root,

Sent up shoot,

Leafed,

But knew neither the joy

Of the flower, nor the perfect fullness

Of the ripened fruit of love.

John Clinton