Poetry-Irene Livingston

Sepia snapshot, edges bent.
Three young women pose by local airport,
smiling, innocent, long coats, dated hats.
Two will ride back home
to safe and sensible lives. The third,

her chrysalid courage transmuted
to a fine recklessness (by her faith in goodness,
happy endings,) will fly into the searing
flame of her passion, only to founder

in swamps of loneliness,
ponds of despondency, at last in a sea
of degradation, her reckless heart faltering
and sinking to stone depths.

Until her sepia courage, wakened
by the flap and scream of life,
will rise, a hungry tide, to the surface
and carry her to the shore of almost-old age.

There, on a vivid island of fulfillment
and achievement, she will, at last, reach
a winged joy that her old friends
will long since have slid past, if indeed
they are blessed enough to ever encounter its equal.

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