Gypsy Heart

This entry is part 46 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

 

Every once in a while the branches part
and there is a gleaming splinter of light–

just enough to nick the rough bark, make it seem
like the scritch of a match head had birthed

its copper sides and these rich, fluttering
halos of green. Hard to court abundance,

hard to keep it— And yet, here is a feather
left behind by the crested bird, the silken pods

from the honey locusts, vermillion threads
pulled from the frayed tapestry: what surged

like ripeness once, continues to show its face—
shy homeless waif, knocking again on your door.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

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One Reply to “Gypsy Heart”

  1. Hard to court abundance, /hard to keep it— . . .what surged/
    like ripeness once, continues to show its face—/ shy homeless waif, knocking again on your door.

    BEWARE, MY FOOLISH HEART…

    When you gave up on dreams we gathered
    like hoarded heartaches haplessly heaped

    in darkened rooms we have long abandoned,
    we stitched close a gaping wound of hurts

    hurled helter skelter in a frenzy of fearsome
    faithlessness we found were a fool’s scimitar.

    O, corazon triste! O, corazon de Gitana!
    A sad, miserable heart is a gypsy heart!

    Beware this desolate heart, when it is hard
    to find and hard to keep: when it surges, as

    it must defiantly burst into a pulsing geyser
    of desire, it will not spare the idle, hardened

    heart. Surging like the ripeness it once was,
    it continues to show its face—a scrawny waif,

    shy and homeless, incessantly knocking,
    insistently rapping at your bolted door.

    You leave it ajar, and it creeps in like the fog
    that chilled your heart once, it lingers, it chokes

    your still smarting heart with a frisson
    of a joie d’couer.You take him in for the night

    and in the coldness of a morning after, phantom
    that it was, leaps out of your window, and leaves.

    —Albert B. Casuga
    05-04-11

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