A Stately Saraband

"The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust."
While you and I, here we stand
To watch it fall where it must.

Hollow heads have clamped their brows
Down with music they can hear
Their whispered words are rushing past
Monoliths their feet can’t bear.

Anymore, oh nevermore
Can they glide, or waltz and play
With puppet strings in wrinkled hands
For their heads are turning gray.

But gray or gold, it matters not
Their battered feet will mark their names
On dancing floors and checquer-boards
Ghosts all playing at bigger games.

Sunset Soliloquies

A poem wanted to know

What the sunset makes me feel

What the orange ink speaks to me of.

If it stains me with nostalgia’s lavender

Or melancholy’s blue.

It was clichéd

But I wondered anyway.

And I didn’t know

I honestly did not.

I looked and looked and tried to see

But there was just so much

And my eyes so small

Can never take all of it in.

Maybe it is too much anyway.

It is like apaixonar, perhaps

A single moment, but never one you can point at.

Or Banjara, a different kind of nomad

Roots everywhere, home nowhere

Like gypsies riding a Catherine Wheel.

I’ve never been to the sea

Sometimes the sunset tells the nemophilist in me about it.

But feel? I don’t know.

It is trouvaille, I suppose, a lovely windfall.

And retrouvaille, the wait always worth it.

A dull, constant entity

Like the ache in my being.

It always does invoke toska, though

Brings it out, hammers it home

My perpetual longing for nothing

Adding to the atlas’s weight on my chest.