Thwarted Love

I said to my soul be still, be still,
If God doesn’t want you, the devil will;
In love there’s always a kiss or a dart,
And both are frenzied as a broken heart.

And if love decays and scorn obtrudes,
Furious as whirlwinds or vipers’ broods,
There’s few who can bluster a stiff-lipped shrug,
Far less a kind word and a parting hug.

For passions broke loose will shred up the clouds
And rip apart mountains like nail-torn shrouds,
And stamped on, disgraced, in the stone-filled mud
The lover’s pale likeness will blacken like blood.

I said to my soul be still, be still,
If God doesn’t want you, the devil will;
Dragged to the judgement, to curse or to bless,
Your tight-ribbed “no” is the devil’s “yes.”

====================
© February 2017

In Forest Glades

Well, I will not claim this as one of the world's finest poems (!) but I have a sneaking liking for it.

----------------

In forest glades
Where lichened seats
Commemorate
   Old maids,

And autumn braids
With berry sweets
Hang soon and late
   In shades,

The year’s light fades,
The birds in bleats
Lament their fate
   Like jades,

Each seat degrades
In frosts, in heats,
Like shrouded, strait,
   Old maids.

====================
© December 2016

Morality

To find one honest truth to say,
   And an honest way to say it,
As if one plunged the Milky Way
   To pluck a new planet,

Is of tasks, even though we pray
   Or sing as does the linnet,
As hard as clutching sea-mad spray
   In the decisive minute.

We are conscience-harried clay
   Though garrotters without merit,
And white coat theories or faith’s hooray
   Cannot empearl that grit.

Yet vicious in the pre-storm grey,
   Sweated in sin’s transit,
A tyrant eyes a child at play
   And longs to hug it.

Such glints of sunlight, gold on hay,
   Bode forth a blood-felt tenet;
Life’s years are blanched by day and day,
   Living, dying, to know it.

====================
© October 2016