“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.” Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Misérables

It’s how she dreams
Of wholeness, of fulfillment,
And of a love that once betrayed her,
(In a cave)
Where her thoughts form as
Drops on stalactites, and wordless
Sighs ingeminate in unending echoes…
It’s how she copes
With loss and despair,
A careworn heart seeking sanctuary
In cold granite sculptures, and those matters
Spent of life; espousing her Quasimodo’s,
She animates them with what
Life has deprived her of,
Imagining [then]
Her wings carrying her
Through the entrance where light
Floods warmly and where, at times (when
Her spirit soars) she fancies Esmeralda rollicking
With Jolly blithely under heavens felicity with no cares…
And she is Esmeralda (for that moment)
Dreaming
Of her Phoebus
Of her completeness
Of her happiness – but as always,
She is somehow torn from the reverie and
Cast back into the cave, where her jaded heart weeps
From the foolishness of dreaming things that can never be…
So she pulls her knees to her chest, and as her hair cascades over her
Eyes a wash of gray begins, again, to replace all illusions of color,
In a cold ground, where dying roots are fixing her immovable

richard lloyd cederberg
11/11