Dreaming of Love by Flashlight

Dreaming of Love by Flashlight

by Michael R. Burch

How sweet the endeavors of lips: to speak

of the heights of those pleasures which left us weak

in love’s strangely lit beds, where the cold springs creak:

for there is no illusion like love ...

Grown childlike, we wish for those storied days,

for those bright sprays of flowers, those primrosed ways

that curled to the towers of Yesterdays

where She braided illusions of love ...

"O, let down your hair!" we might call and call,

to the dark-slatted window, the moonlit wall ...

but our love is a shadow; we watch it crawl

like a spidery illusion. For love ...

was never as real as that first kiss seemed

when we read by the flashlight and dreamed.

Published by Romantics Quarterly and The Eclectic Muse (Canada). This poem recalls the secret thrills of reading books by flashlight in bed under the covers as children. Keywords/Tags: Childhood, children, bed, bedtime, story, flashlight, kiss, goodnight, dreams, pleasures, lips, fantasy, illusion