Poem XIX: Holly Healing

Below is the ninth and final poem in the Holly Brightweed cycle.
I have a steady, heady lust for light.
I breathe (what time of day
the light goes gray)
sharp sheen of coming night;
Drink the whitened brilliance
in which late-night shoppers swim,
and chase those glows that kindle dim
through Juney velvet fields their bobbing dance.
Wild for moon, I will
wait in a wintry [...]

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Poem XVI: Holly Brightweed, Second Narrative

Holly Brightweed and her willing beau
unspeaking wandered on the shaggy ridge
that topped her father’s strip of land
much like the tooth-torn cartilage
of a dog’s well-loved and well-gnawed bone.
For feathered weeds, mostly dead,
were mashed and crashed
through hollow and head -
all colorless, or brown, or sickly green.
Holly said it was the scene
she found the saddest all year round.
“Spring [...]

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Poem XV: Holly Brightweed and Richard Healing: Their Unspoken Thoughts

Holly: what a white-souled, grey-faced child.
Her feet shrink in this snow,
Her head hangs down beneath this heavy sky…
Oh that I knew why.
Richard: not distinguished, wealthy, wild,
Not anything I know.
Yet warmly does he speak to me – he makes
Of me his human kin.
Stooped in bluish pools of grief-bruised skin
Her eyes that once were suns
So feebly and so [...]

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Poem XIII: Holly Brightweed’s Final Thought of Justin

…then at last it slipped my gasping grasp
and shot down in that white abyss
where all things go that
Could Have Been,
but are not.
My hand still held that stiff clammy clasp
around the hole it left. How this -
this outcome? How? Flat
I sagged then,
hope hissed out.
Then He came – and spoke, as once before:
“Who grasps will lose. But loose [...]

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Poem VII: What Holly Brightweed Would Have Said to Justin

Love me, lad.
I dare not ask thee,
Would not task thee,
Yet I’m sad
Not to hear thee
Or be near thee;
Love me, lad.
Love me, lad -
Yet don’t fear me;
If you’re weary
Go, be glad,
Live without me.
Lie about thee,
I won’t, lad.
Nothing, lad,
Is what you owe me.
Proud to know thee,
To have had
some moments with thee
Bright, kind, witty,
Dearest lad!
But if, lad,
You’ve just [...]

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Poem VI: Justin, the Violinist, Dismisses Holly’s Interest

Holly had an eager glance tonight;
She probed my eyes, attended to my hands,
as if she thinks I know the master’s touch
to make her pour out some unearthly song
and almost paint the air with gold and light!
It’s true she’d play for me; almost demands
that she be played. This girl’s suspense is such
as tunes my violin strings [...]

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Poem IV; Holly Brightweed A Young Woman; Her Romantic Era

…
 
John Keats once prayed to touch a maiden’s wrist!
I merely pray that I’ll not first be kissed
(awkward as it must be) before an audience,
Nor by some hurried boy far too intense,
Nor by some practiced jerk who’ll grade my nerved embrace.
I pray to be proposed to with some grace,
to find some garment not-too-short, for first-night rite,
and [...]

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Poem III – Holly Brightweed a Young Girl

Holly Brightweed spread her arms and ran
out from the double hayloft doors, and yelled
“I’m riding home, Dad! See you there!”. She bent
and snatched the green knit scarf her basket held,
wound her neck, then seized her prostrate bike.
“Now down this frozen track in time” she said,
“befitting Gwenyth’s steed.” Both grace and use
she had in mounting; sternly [...]

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