Poetry by Michael Burch
CHLOE
There were skies onyx at night ... moons by day ...
lakes pale as her eyes ... breathless winds
undressing tall elms ... she would say
that we’d loved, but some book said we’d sinned.
Soon impatiens too fiery to stay
sagged; the crocus bells drooped, golden-limned;
things of brightness, rinsed out, ran to grey ...
all the light of that world softly dimmed.
Where our feet were inclined, we would stray;
there were paths where dead weeds stood untrimmed,
distant mountains that loomed in our way,
thunder booming down valleys dark-hymned.
What I found, I found lost in her face
by yielding all my virtue to her grace.
(Originally published by Romantics Quarterly as “A Dying Fall”)
MIRAGE
You came to me as rain breaks on the desert
when every flower springs to life at once.
But joys are wan illusions to the expert:
the Bedouin has learned how not to want.
Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into fourteen languages, incorporated into three plays and two operas, and set to music by seventeen composers.
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