Phoebe's Song

Alone does the evening find me, on the back porch in my favorite chair
pondering the days events, until the moon rises before me, and breathless I stare
at a fleeting hint of movement, a lady floating, with her elegant head bowed
in sadness it seems...but I shake my head. It was, after all, just a cloud.

How remorselessly has maturity found me, I realize, as I gaze into the night.
Forgotten dreams return unbidden, reflecting intermittently against the twilight.
But those dreams have succumbed to responsibility, wisdom acquired at such cost
as ever I've tried to live for the moment...but so soon that moment's lost.

In my youth I knew a storyteller. What wondrous tales he'd tell.
Of princes and beautiful maidens, dark witches and evil spells.
He'd take me on magical journeys in a rainbow colored hot air balloon.
Or off I'd soar to the Heavens, to dance with the Maiden of the Moon.

I would swim with graceful mermaids within Atlantis' fabled halls
and sail with the ghost of Blackbeard through thunderous ocean squalls.
Homework would lay unremembered, on a shadowy table off out of the way
while I'd visit with mighty Odin, or the flightless angels in dusty Pompeii.

Ah, just once to have seen a mermaid, or even just once to have set sail
adrift from this tedium of commerce, but such thoughts are to little avail.
The phone pulls me back from my reverie, but I ignore it's strident ring
and imagine, if only for a moment, that I hear my Phoebe softly sing.

Foolishly while in my forties, this impassioned time I tried to reclaim
when once I abandoned all sense of propriety to return without any shame
back to that place where tales of adventure once held me in their thrall
but all that remained of the storyteller was just a shadow on a faded wall.