Petrarch's Laura

Anyone reading this page will probably wish they had stayed awake when the teacher dicussed sonnets and Renaissance Love.

Jimi Hendrix is playing "Cherokee Mist" as I sit and look at my keyboard. It's hard to believe so many years I slipped by since he played that song. His hair never turned white.

Petrarch was much better at this. But then he was tempted by his Laura.

I'm not in his class. But I do remember some of the reasons he wrote and I can get close to the technicalities.

I remember the first time I encountered "symbolic" love. Idiots.

And now?

Maybe they were onto something. No arguements about coffee spoon and bars of soap.

So here is my shot at symbolic- told from near a mountaintop in NC.

I look back down far below
My body aches from steps too quickly picked
Hoping for comfort from words that contradict
I murmur: “she I can’t know!”

I’ve left no broad tracks to show,
Not a loving cup for my stone to depict,
I stop, dismayed and pale: Maybe I’ve been tricked?
My eyes tear. Reap what I sow.

A question assails me from the mountain mist
My sad tears: how can my dreams 
Live far from that which I missed? 

The wind replies: remember your secret list
Platonic lovers’ taste cold streams,
Free from the constricted twisted human tryst.

G