Issue 8, January 2011
The Dark Lady Cometh
By Dan Hettmannsperger III
There are events of sorrow,
Moments of crushing sadness,
Anguish as absolute as
A permanent total eclipse,
And there are the women
Who endure such horrors
With a will like tempered steel,
With the endurance of 300 Spartans.
Elaine, my sweet Elaine, is such
A woman.
Her beautiful black skin
Held beneath its velvet softness
The power to make worlds
As the void of space brings forth
The stars—and Elaine was all this
And more,
A smile,
A sigh,
A glance that could shatter
like the fists of Hercules.
She moved with the confidence
Of a Jazz solo, unhindered
By gravity or the breath of the wind.
She is the dark eyed goddess
Who showed me the light
Of a love incendiary enough to melt
Even two decades of despair
And put even my bluest sorrows
In checkmate … forever …
BIO: Dan Hettmannsperger III was discovered in an a small alien spacecraft that seems to have been launched from the doomed planet Oklahoma and landed in the parking lot outside Macy's where the young Dan was raised by checkout girls as one of their own. Dan discovered that the yellow rays from our sun gave him the power to write poetry and he started where George Orwell left off, in 1984. He is a Buddhist, a Democrat, and spends entirely too much time on Facebook complaining about the state of the human condition.
