If Not For Love
If Not For Love
by Michael R. Burch, circa age 18
The little child who cries,
brushing sleep from startled eyes,
might not have awakened from her dreams
to fill the night with plaintive screams
if not for love.
The little collie pup
who tore the sofa up
and pleads here in a mournful crouch,
might not have ripped apart the couch
if not for love.
And the little flower pot
that broke and littered the rug with sod
might not have been dropped if a child had not tried
to place it at her mother's bedside—
if not for love.
Crocodilian, Shining Bright!
by Michael R. Burch
apologies to William Blake (but he might approve)
Crocodilian, shining bright,
In the Nile by pale moonlight,
What immortal hand or eye
Dared frame your fearful symmetry?
In what veiling depths do you
now glide like death—unerring, true
to your strange nature, till you rise
to awe, dismember, terrorize?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of your heart?
And when your heart began to beat,
What dread hand? (& will we meet?)
What great hammer forged the chain
Of your strange armor? What cruel brain
imagined jaws so strong, so cruel,
so full of teeth and bloody drool?
When the stars’ immaculate light
First brushed you on that sixth dark night,
Did he who formed you laugh to see
Your teeth agleam, your eye on me?
Crocodilian, shining bright,
In the Nile by pale moonlight,
What immortal hand or eye
Dared frame your fearful symmetry?
I have a vivid memory of writing "If Not For Love" while I was still living with my parents, probably around age 18. There had been some sort of accident in my mother’s bedroom involving the family dog, and as I left after helping to clean up the mess, the poem came to me as I stood in the doorway. According to my notes, I revised the poem several years later, in 1982, to remove an inversion in the second stanza but the poem remains essentially the same.
Keywords/Tags: love, child, childhood, children, dream, dreams, night, nightmare, screams, cry, cries, collie, pup, puppy, dog, sofa, couch
Copyright ©
Michael Burch
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