POETRY: Pieces of Her Heart

“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you." E.M. Foster ― A Room with A View

“In a world full of temporary things you are a perpetual feeling.” ― Sanober Khan

“I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.” ― Socrates

© Pieces of Her Heart

She sat outside quietly sewing pieces of her heart together,

Shedding old pains yet weeping for what used to be.

Once the proprietress of a late-model, gas-guzzler,

Her reveries wove summer rains and red wine kisses,

Sun-baked tans on aging skin, and hopeless-wish reflections.

Another stitch and two long sighs burrowed away from cold-blooded lies

On tear-stained parchment, aged by time, and coiled around her feet.

Raindrops that struck a tiny tin cup sounded like submarine pings.

Following shadows to tender places along magnolia-lined lanes,

It was more difficult for her to swim in oceans of parking lots

And wish-you-were-here loveless postcards mailed from

Obligation than it was for her to let absent lovers rest in peace.

Fingers braided with thread sewed in mysteries for future lovers to

Solve before departing whole while reducing her to scattered pieces;

Dragonflies, crooning frogs, and panther-dark clouds echoed her thoughts as

She sat outside quietly sewing pieces of her heart together.

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(painting: Young Woman Sewing in The Garden, Mary Cassatt, 1886, oil on canvas)