Romance Revisited III
https://poems.culturing.net/2026/10/15/romance-revisited-iii/
Why does this ghost reappear (en photo)
after all these years, to haunt me now
with reminders of what could have been?
She still smiles that radiant smile,
rocks her cowboy hat, ring on her thumb,
and walks joyfully through the years
her two kids and husband. She could
have been mine, had I been
something else, something suited to life
in a house with a woman and the family
such situations tend to produce. She
was lovely, and still is, but just out of reach
for the part of me under the mask,
the part that lives here in these poems,
the part that will never be silenced.
What was this sacred space, this grove
of mind unfurled, enclosing the avenues
of possibility? Did Plato beckon, and why
was there no resisting the allure of Sophia,
even when faced with the warmth of love? Love came
and went, but lingers forever, like it always does.
Yet she hasn't changed, and possesses still
that spark of illumination that first lit my fire
so long ago, long before so much was lost,
never to return again. Other muses appear
but few soften my heart like she did, and fewer
inspire the hope and trust that I know
she knew how to fulfill. And I see her fulfill it even now.
But time presses on. So must I.
As I gaze at the desolate sky, fist raised,
I imagine a safer place for those hearts
whose simplicity grants them a peace unknowable
by we who have seen too much. I will do what I can
to protect them. I lend them my voice.
I have lent them my heart already.