Dual Sonnets

                    1

Comes the day you begin missing her
though you never knew Chicago . . .
Word is she’s moved east,
where pigeons live on tenement rooftops
and rarely fail to return home,
you don’t know why. You only knew
the deer you saw once before dawn
looking very much at home
on Amsterdam, with an unerring sense
for Central Park or some other glade
resembling that of its kin in a king’s
Deer Park. Surely she knows by now
you love her. Let the pigeons and deer be
where her eyes brighten so they may see.

                    2

It is impossible to imagine
returning. Endless walking, eyes aglow
to warm my side, I do not know how
we missed meeting in our sleep.
Such ordinary pleasures,
no need to linger, wait to be vouchsafed
but simply go, arrive, be what you are
where all your life you were meant to be.

It’s what the great divide in the sky
meant to say once you could hear.
She devotes her life now to listening.
She can tell you your heart’s direction
and heeding her plan you are always home.
No need to wonder where there is to roam.

                                                                              Leila Shulamit

(20 May 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander