Member Poem

for Beth

Have you tasted the bitterness of tears of despair?
Have you watched the sun sink through such pale, balmless air
that your soul sought its shell like a crab on a beach,
then scuttled inside to be safe, out of reach?

Might I lift you tonight from earth’s wreckage and damage
on these waves gently rising to pay the moon homage?
Or better, perhaps, let me say that I, too,
have dreamed of infinity . . . windswept and blue.

This poem was originally published by TC Broadsheet Verses (for a whopping $10, my first cash payment) then subsequently by Piedmont Literary Review, Penny Dreadful, the Net Poetry and Art Competition, Songs of Innocence, Setu (India), Better Than Starbucks, Borderless Journal (Singapore), Poetry Life & Times, Formal Verse (Potcake Poet’s Choice) and The Chained Muse. This poem was originally longer, but I was never happy with the longer version. I thought the first two stanzas were superior to the remainder of the poem, and at some point, years later, it occurred to me to let the poem end where it does now. It was only after I pared the poem down to the first two stanzas that I considered it publishable. I now consider it to be one of my best poems. This is one of my early poems that made me feel like a “real poet,” along with “Reckoning,” “Playmates,” “Time,” “Am I” and a few others. I wrote the longer poem as a teenager, to no one in particular, but after I met Beth I revised the poem and dedicated it to her, as the lover and soul mate I had been searching for. The closing lines say that I, too, have felt darkness and despair, and have felt utterly alone. But the hope of the poem is that we are not alone. This poem is my “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

Keywords/Tags: tears, despair, loneliness, alienation, sea, moon, infinity, love, companionship, understanding, soul mates