Love Eternal

An assignment for class I had to write a poem about painting. This is the painting and this is my poem.

 

Part 1

There is order in the clouds

Sentinels observing the angles

The slope of his spine as he draws her

Her red hair draped like a cape

Over the arm of a troubadour

Teasing whom he has already stabbed

And prepared for the kill

Her arm hangs from the precipice

Pointing at the romantic embrace

The prequel, in either case,

We cannot see their faces

An unnecessary identity

 

Part 2

The year before she died of pneumonia

We gathered together in the gulf

And cast her father’s ashes to the bay

On days I behaved, I got to wear her gloves

She kept to hide her wrists

When the bottle tipped the wrong way

In the end table I found the apology

Unopened and unsent. I threw it with his

Playboys.

We waded out a path to shore and

She told me she was free of him

We gave her a headstone.

 

Part 3

There is no easy road.

They killed my God with a microscope

And political “tolerance”.

Equated my faith to naivety.

The year the oranges froze on the limb

They sent the centaur missile

It bombed the moon, its anarchic plume

Meant to reveal what I already know is true

That there is more to the design

And we are not alone.

Reviews

[.]

you use such great imagery in your writing...:-)
"The year the oranges froze on the limb
They sent the centaur missile
It bombed the moon, its anarchic plume"
...just superb!!!--love this!!!

james:-)

[The Viking]

As with all your poems, this is beautiful and sincere. This is just my take on it, but I'm guessing the two lovers exist in a sort of afterlife, judging from the subject in the second stanza. They could represent parts of the viewer lost in little deaths throughout life, judging from the lack of identity, however this is about your poem, not an artistic analysis. I liked how you drew the middle scene, part 2, to be a sort of memory. A sad, yet bittersweet one of a girl being released by death from an abusive father. That's what I got from it, I could be totally wrong. Part 3 held excellent poetic expression, "They killed my God with a microscope and political "tolerance." I also love the description of the centaur mission and how it was used to elucidate an inherent knowledge of the eternal that had been buried by the said microscope and tolerance. The ultimate theme here is that there is indeed an order to the universe, despite the negativity and horror within the world.