Barren trees loom along these highway pastures,
Curled and knurled, knots of fruitless branch mass,
Laid to waste in open fields of grass and prickly cactus;
Entangled plastic, decaying bags blowing apart, caught.
Twisting and insisting for thirty years.
Your form was the ideal, the idol, the standard.
Yet one that one couldn’t quite come to grasp.
“Miss Stockholm” both a syndrome and a sin
Whom could do no wrong even as she did
Every kind of wrong. Yet I idolized, one after the other;
Many pretty faces funneled into
Pools of turbid, muddy water; merely a poor
Reflection of that which I could only hope
To possess in the infinite eternity of heaven.
Lord show me! Lord help me! Lord lead me!
You! The author of authentic Love; take me to something
Crystal clear and pure; more than the myriad
Counterfeit phantasms; feint illusions now laying arid
This empty wasteland where furrowed and fertile fields
Were meant to multiply and stretch skyward; watered in Love.
-Gary Edward Geraci