Secret Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Graying girls make love to
Suicide in the rain.
They do not sing,
Nor do they complain—
There is someone sleeping
On the other side of the tree,
Who it is they cannot see—
As the adders hiss Satan’s name through
The flooding grass,
“Asmodeus, Asmodeussss”
They do not bite their tattooed ankles,
They just slither past—
There is something floating
Deep in the sea’s gray brine,
What it is you’ll never find—
And the dead daisy girls just lay there
Looking up at the sky, their wrists
Don’t whistle nor wonder why,
As their words curl like escargot
Around their inner ears,
What it is you’ll never hear.
For maybe they are already deep in love
With their men lost in the Great War,
Even now dancing on some far distance shore.