Her Chestnut Hair

Her chestnut hair, loosened, cascading endlessly, gone. Her never-tiring gaze searching the corners of my heart, gone. Her smile so radiant it outshone the sun, gone. Her words in which she reinvented the world, no more. Her beauty outlasted twenty summers and then was gone. I never saw them cut her locks, never saw the light in her starved eyes pale, never saw her smile retreat, or heard her fall silent as her body slowly froze before they burned her, too, upon some piled-up pyre. For I stood by as the black car took her, At a distance Safe Rooted My love dismissed by egoism