Unfulfilled Poem by Robert Rorabeck

She hid her eyes from me
Like cognizant blue diamonds
That once searched under her lashes’
Sexy canopy.
She ran away and buried them
When from far overseas I wrote
To her that I loved her in a thousand
Letters scribbled out on the frontlines
Where fear gripped me in the trenches
As the heavens had turned into the
Screeching of heavy iron doors,
And the earth exploded from the rain
Of icepicks on those steel shores—
She couldn’t admit what she might
Have seen in me;
That, while holding hands and eating
Melting ice-cream in the summer’s promenade,
She had seen death crawling in me like
A creeping servant of time,
So under the lemony sun and through
The sleepy curtains of citric light,
She had smelled the decaying mutation
Of my tragic end,
And thus she refused to look at me,
To return my love from so far away,
Making her bury her beautiful sight so
That when I died, the exploded husk sleeping
With his rifle in the dirt as men screamed,
She could not see me from so far away—
Only in the dark, fingertips feeling through
The warm prick of a candle’s single flame,
After my letters had stopped
And my uncle had sent me home to
Sleep forever under her, did she dare to open
Her eyes again upon the man who had survived.
In the dark warmth of their bed she revealed
Her eyes, while they lived in the night,
The sleepy blueness of those things she needed to
Show. When the day slipped over the horizon
Like an intrusive priest upon her private sorrows,
She put them away again,
Cast them toward the earth
Where my eyes seemed to stare back up at
Her from so far away
Refusing to see my love for her unfulfilled.