In the Twilight of Her Tears

In the Twilight of Her Tears by Michael R. Burch, age 19 In the twilight of her tears I saw the shadows of the years that had taken with them all our joys and cares ... There in an ebbing tide’s spent green I saw the flotsam of lost dreams wash out into a sea of wild despair ... In the scars that marred her eyes I saw the cataracts of lies that had shattered all the visions we had shared ... As from a ravaged iris, tears seemed to flood the spindrift years with sorrows that the sea itself despaired ... Prodigal This poem is dedicated to Kevin Longinotti, who died four days short of graduation from Vanderbilt University, the victim of a tornado that struck Nashville on April 16, 1998. You have graduated now, to a higher plane and your heart’s tenacity teaches us not to go gently though death intrudes. For eighteen days —jarring interludes of respite and pain— with life only faintly clinging, like a cashmere snow, testing the capacity of the blood banks with the unstaunched flow of your severed veins, in the collapsing declivity, in the sanguine haze where Death broods, you struggled defiantly. A city mourns its adopted son, flown to the highest ranks while each heart complains at the harsh validity of God’s ways. On ponderous wings the white clouds move with your captured breath, though just days before they spawned the maelstrom’s hellish rift. Throw off this mortal coil, this envelope of flesh, this brief sheath of inarticulate grief and transient joy. Forget the winds which test belief, which bear the parchment leaf down life’s last sun-lit path. We applaud your spirit, O Prodigal, O Valiant One, in its percussive flight into the sun, winging on the heart’s last madrigal. Keywords/Tags: twilight, tears, years, joys, cares, dreams, sea, despair, lies, vision,