The ashy earth of incense burned
That smoke the night so unconcerned
For petals make the midnight sweet
With starlight prostrate at their feet
Who lived a dream but woke too soon
This life just glares a hot high noon
Light taunts my hope, pretends to swoon
Paints false fair hues across my moon
Karma’s beast just feasts on sin
So why does heat scorch finer skin
And meadows seem the first to burn
The sweetest flowers, life to spurn
I beg the dark to hold my hands
That clutch so desperate burning sands
Tried to fix my glassy heart
Yet left with rains of shattered parts
But when the angry sun glows bright
Your budding stem I shield ‘til night
The worst of love is only fear
To kiss goodbye who holds you dear
What’s left of day’s not ours to know
So hold me now, and don’t let go
Afterword
The queen of the night is a flower that blooms once a year in the middle of the night. It’s also a name in Vietnamese, the name of someone very dear to me. Every new shade of meaning in writing is simply a display of the robustly gentle nuance behind emotions and the human experience. My most genuine poems are my most subtle ones. It’s a little as if I’ve spent a day sitting outside under gentle rainfall trying to make sense of the depths of grief and hopelessness that inundate an unfair world. My lamenting ends when I let out a sigh to stand up and go on with my life…because that’s the only choice we have. And in our moments of loving someone so desperately but being unable to hold them in our arms in their hardest times for fear of harming them, a certain part of our hearts dies inside. The childhood innocence could never comprehend how unjust illness is anyways. But even if from afar, with this newfound comprehension, our hardened hearts can be tender once more because that is what is necessitated to heal our dearly beloved of physical afflictions.
Featured image generated by Word Press’s AI image generator.
Write Our World 