If Love Is Folly…


“If love is folly, I’m your man. Give him pity, not your hate,”
he said upon the Junebug’s shell,
the ring of fire that rounds the house.
Prevarication’s not your vice: you speak black truth to summer’s eye.
You are not always loved for this. The wanton greensward pecks the grass.
A dodehexahedron stands immaculate on green fields of ice.
Perhaps a throw of rug would toss the air with whiskers, spiders, mice.
I cannot say. I cannot know. For I am mad for you, you know.
I break to justice, loss, and fate.
I litter pillows with my tears,
am lost in the forest of the years,
and no birds listen to my name.	

And yet I have of wisdom won these few aspersions to its rule.
Have you a right to happiness in this one life you only know?
There is no other where but here;
the trick is catching fireflies before they cinder to the skies.
Be kind to the thing that you call “me,”
you will be kind to humanity.
We all are lost in the labyrinth
of time and space; infinity
is eternity’s other face.
Power, wealth and fame are phantoms,
and love is a beautiful illusion.
The distant battles end in war,
and there is the mouth of the cave. I feel
the thread that will save me from the Minotaur.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.