01-26-2013, 02:45 AM
Slightly revised version)
An African and European knelt
beneath the same cross.
Sharing a missal, they were
close enough to smell the sweetness
on each other’s breath.
They talked shyly initially,
giggling unnecessarily,
she, unraveling metropolitan inanities
he, extolling the beauty of wildness.
Thus, they came, breathless, into each
other’s lives and reveries.
Shared moments fizzed by, yet not one was missed.
Their liaison, despite its perils, cradled them
and consumed Christmas to crucifixion in the time it took to kiss.
Crossing cultures with bravura,
mixing colours with chutzpah
and with beguiling attention to each other,
spanning the gap of
generations with viaducts
cemented in trust.
They stood, unblinking through storms of bitterness,
siphoning the wind of those racist tempests
toward the fervour they shared.
Fearlessly shouldering burdens and cares into
a blackness, whitened by passion's flare.
But from the flame that lit their route
crackled pernicious, unholy sparks
of condemnation, spat from bloodline mouths.
Viaducts crumbled as truth flaked to dust
Neither chutzpah nor bravura
can restore that lust of spring-time.
Both aware of love gone amiss,
they bought each other missals
to avoid the pungency of halitosis.
An African and European knelt
beneath the same cross.
Sharing a missal, they were
close enough to smell the sweetness
on each other’s breath.
They talked shyly initially,
giggling unnecessarily,
she, unraveling metropolitan inanities
he, extolling the beauty of wildness.
Thus, they came, breathless, into each
other’s lives and reveries.
Shared moments fizzed by, yet not one was missed.
Their liaison, despite its perils, cradled them
and consumed Christmas to crucifixion in the time it took to kiss.
Crossing cultures with bravura,
mixing colours with chutzpah
and with beguiling attention to each other,
spanning the gap of
generations with viaducts
cemented in trust.
They stood, unblinking through storms of bitterness,
siphoning the wind of those racist tempests
toward the fervour they shared.
Fearlessly shouldering burdens and cares into
a blackness, whitened by passion's flare.
But from the flame that lit their route
crackled pernicious, unholy sparks
of condemnation, spat from bloodline mouths.
Viaducts crumbled as truth flaked to dust
Neither chutzpah nor bravura
can restore that lust of spring-time.
Both aware of love gone amiss,
they bought each other missals
to avoid the pungency of halitosis.