The Romantic

By Mory Keita

Though she is not Cinderella or snow white,

She lives their lives and dreams in the castle,

Where she is stranded in a dungeon for life,

Till her charming prince delivers her from the wicked spell.

Then,when she wakes up from fairyland she sees no prince.

A classic fairytale she lives in her sleeps,

Awake a  modern tragedy she experiences.

She reads poetry; listen to it, like her bible.

She imagines herself in John Donne’s hands,

While he recites that poetic melody in her ears,

The wind transporting sounds of her name to the ears of

Envious sirens in Neptune, the sun sweeping her face.

She wishes she was a Byron’s or a Poe’s lover,

Or at least one they fancy in their poetic dreams,

And write about lines unheard, unwritten by men, lines such as:

    Vois-tu  mon amour  le soleil qui brille ?

   Écoutes-tu la chanson des pigeons volant ?

   Ils envient  notre bonheur, notre amour.                             

She fancies that  lady, that “mon amour”,

She wishes she could find the whirl of space- time,

She years to travel to the romantic era,

She desires to fall in love with the Victorians,

The Shakespeares and the likes of Caspar Davis Friedrich;

With her fairness she would seduce the romantics,

She would make them write poems, novels and paint,

Paintings like never before, with a passion molded in romance.

She pray that  men could rise above sexual fantasies,

She aspires to become an art, an inspiration.

Alas! her aura of romance is but pathetic fancy,

For romance, as she wishes, is but a joke to modern men.

She pities the dullness of our era, this unromantic jungle.

This epoch  without castles, dungeons and princes.

She is bored by this world without fairy, witches and happy ending.

She misses the romantics maybe because of her naiveté,

Or she had been rocked by false tales of quixotic lovers,

Or perhaps, she is simply some lunatic, a mind living in fairyland.

  

I too pity her much, much to sympathize.

Though I am not a Tennyson or Byron or a poetic heart,

Nor I am Don Quixote , Don Juan or a chivalrous prince,

I too feel lost in this materialistic universe of ladies.

We both are lost in romance like sad clowns on stages.


Brief history: i wrote this in response to another of my poem The jerk because i thought i had generalized too much.
Shared with the one stop poetry community.

The Romantic