By Tamara B. Latham, c 2007
Unrelenting sun, Tennessee.
Lava ball flung into the sky,
red as the pits of hell and twice as hot,
sweating out our souls in mid-July.
Yet, the waters of Connecticut run cool.
Her ships drift across my memory
to sail beneath an ebon quilt of stars,
as melancholia closes in on me.
The clock slowly beats away the time.
Hours elapse to days too bleak to count,
but the landscape briefly permeates my mind,
when Fall rolls through the hills as liquid gold
to scatter leaves vermilion, copper singed;
remnants of a life not meant to be.
Though you are there and I am here too long,
every star I see I think of you.
We viewed the lighted houses well below,
whose roads ran serpentine through mounding snow,
zoomed in on walls that formed each hollowed room,
then juxtaposed the gaiety and gloom.
While crumbs were sprinkled sparsely on the floor
to fatten the emaciated poor,
the great were filled, their bellies stuffed like hogs.
"I'm Nobody," but loathe these "public frogs."
We passed the citrine disc, which sweeps the night,
our horseman veering blindly to the right.
The carriage caromed off the fields of faith,
where I, the passenger, and you, the wraith,
abruptly stopped to hear a clock that chimed,
the empty midnight notes of "Auld Lang Syne."
