Tag: romance

Balcony Poems: Embracing Nature’s Melodies

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I sat on my balcony and listened to the blackbird leading the dawn chorus. In the early morning hours, I wrote this poem. I find birdsong so joyous! It uplifts and gives me a sense of freedom.

I sit on the balcony, the moon
not shining in a miner's coal sky.

The birds must know something.
They sing with voices looped

around my breath's plume; pale –
a ghost, an albino wren; its beak 

submerged in a lake. A blackbird 
is a piccolo; your smooth hands 

silkworms, spinning skeins on my 
breasts. Your breath, a warm breeze

at the nape of my neck. The white 
dove's wings are flutters in my chest

as I stargaze; I look for your heart. 
I see your lips in the blackbird's

song. Your whispers beguile me,
is that so wrong?

©2023 Sarah Drury

I said to the moon, ‘You know nothing’.

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We stand at the shore,
our toes foam with blue ink.
I dive for oysters, my graceless feet
a mermaid’s tail.
I anoint your milky orbs with pearls.

Your eyes are moonstones,
smile, a crescent moon.
You are the lighthouse; I am a moth
attracted to your light.

I stutter constellations;
Cassiopeia trips over my tongue.
A Mirrorball of stars ricochets from
the sunburst of your song.

The sea makes screen prints;
sells them to tourists drinking tears
from champagne flutes.
They cling to glaciers;
carve ice sculptures of love lost.

Our skeletons are xylophones.
We play all the songs —
they are lifelines on our palms.
I do not believe in God,
but we kiss and the universe is ours.

We are stardust,
I write sonnets,
You sing psalms


©2024 Sarah Drury



Glass

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My husband passed away 12 years ago, which affected me deeply for a long time. I have come to terms with his death, which was traumatic. I wrote this poem as a tribute to our love. 

GLASS


You hold me, I am porcelain. 
I am chipped in places, but not broken.
You like the chinks and cracks, 
they let hope shine in. 

Our lips meet in earthshine, 
until the moon’s shadow dances 
at my throat.

Your hands, they are granite, 
they are feathers.
I like the crowns of thorns 
you wear upon your palms. 

They make me bleed 
when you place
them on my breasts.
I know we are living
amongst the dying.

I am Venus, you create me. 
You take me from my abstract world 
and paint me into starry skies 
above the Rhone.

Your kind hands model the widow 
from the girl. You carve me 
out of glass to see 
if this heart still beats –

if it is still yours.


Copyright © Sarah Drury 2022

Ophelia (1910)

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after John William Waterhouse

              Be thou as chaste as ice:       as pure as snow:
    your purity a catechism.
                 
 Flowers grace your palms, in repose.
                          Get thee to a nunnery:
                                     a virgin?      Can we know?
                                     
 Anoint your flame hair -
                                thou shalt not escape
                                     calumny:    your visage:
                   
your chaste lips, a phantom kiss
                   cheeks smarted rose with denial.

                                The trees are vessels of your        sorrow.

                                                 Ophelia,     love is a dead Hawthorn. 


Copyright © Sarah Drury 2022


Waterhouse, J.W. (1910) - Ophelia 
Shakespeare, W. - Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1 (Hamlet to Ophelia