If Love Is Folly…


“If love is folly, I’m your fool. Give him 
    your pity, not your hate,”
he said upon the Junebug’s shell.
The ring of fire 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.
Perhaps a throw of rug would toss the air 
    with whiskers, spiders, mice.
A dodehexahedron stands immaculate on  
    green fields of ice.
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 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.