Eyeful of stars

Lost in the sheets yet never finding the bed

That night no poetry came home to rest

No contentment but daydreams banishing sleep

Of a dance in the dark and a touch on the cheek

This false-beating heart will twist her awake

While yearnings prick sweeter than honour or faith

An eyeful of stars to corner her dreams

Her innermost faults become her innermost seams

 

 

 

Of flowers past

Where light my darling coming

Through the white Queen’s lace and fetters

Of summer tendrils yellowing

I see her love of shoot and sprig

Of loosestrife even as asters

Her mouth a bow of girlish charm

Her hands everywhere trailing

So she was six summers past

And so now I briefly see her

Better cast in my adoration

Than all the sun’s rayed splendour

~

Elizabeth Cook, 2017

Image from Karen Margulis

Another

Not another dram of guilt, I pray

In this sickly, flickering light

Yet my hand pours of its own accord

And inexorably lifts the cup

~

Elizabeth Cook, 2017

None better dressed than I

Such cheerful rags; much my maker made of me

And yet more in fortune gave, until time’s fickle Chanticleer

Called his third of a vernal April’s day, upon the dew still glistening

So I contend – no matter the hour, I went with the dawn

Betwixt her red clouds scudding

~

Elizabeth Cook, 2017

Painting by Thomas Kinkade

A parting still

My lady, a voluptuous sky her only rest,

The bedchamber become a bower, become a glade,

Sings fain to dampen cheeks and furrow brows

All her own

Of what she sees, I know nothing save

She spoke of rays cleaving Apollo’s dome

Of antique palettes creeping ‘pon the clouds

Once, long ago

And here this mawkish discontent of mine

Amid notes spilling chamber to chamber

Amid wonder dulled to erasure

Within my breast

My lady, an unknown sky her only rest,

Seeks strings over vanished, varnished curves

And burgeoning days of warmth gone by

Now lonesome

~

Elizabeth Cook, 2016

Imagine from Landscape Painting Gallery

The Queen of Nineteen Trebles

The Queen of Nineteen Trebles

Over Dwyrenland held sway

And Heimlenholm and Ruddland

And many more to date

Yet, “My kingdom for a sceptre”

She oftentimes would say

And none did understand her,

So grand as she was vague.

For she had a crown of moonstones,

And the mountain leopard’s cape

And in her right hand firmly

Shone the sceptre of her state.

Watercolour city

I would cry for the beauty

Of that falling old-new city

Watercolours a keen note

And the sky, a walkway singing

You knew me there

And we traced between

Stone bridges and fluted steel

The flowers, the bells still ringing

Rainbowed eyes and sea arising

Where we walked I swim, tiring

So time is passing by

In the watercolour city

~

Elizabeth Cook, 2016

On March Comes in like a Lion ED