secrets

These are Romantic poems (with a capital R) that I have written under the influence of feminine beauty and poets like Sappho, e. e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Kevin N. Roberts, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

She Gathered Lilacs
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

She gathered lilacs
and arrayed them in her hair;
tonight, she taught the wind to be free.

I know why purple lips are silent; ice-petals frozen cold
in earth’s rank heat. War-scars streak, bleed purple blood
all over in the sticky, slimy, sooty mud.