Featured in New Lyre Summer 2022
Alone
Before you were here, I knew you.
You haunted me, a persistent Spirit, even in my boyhood.
Solitary stones on lonely ponds I played,
Whose every ripple whispered your name.
And in those same still waters, I saw your face,
And I knew that too.
Those eyes, more clear and calm
Than streams or stars or even my youth.
And in the rain, especially lightning summer storms,
Your laughter trickled through the gutters
Of my father's house
And splashed and leapt in tiny puddles,
Black beneath my dim-lit room—
In shining pools of mingled tears.
I wept silently, even then, for you.
Sometimes I thought I heard your voice,
That faery song of my every life,
Sighing through the longing wind-swept nights.
You seemed to me then an impossible dream;
Like sacred music carried on a funereal breeze,
I felt you, singing madly through the night-stained trees.
And whenever I have lain, unassailed,
Beneath the full and wide-eyed Moon,
I have known you there as well.
And by Her light I have wept to know
That you shine on me
Alone.
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