Ramon Loyola
Histories
We were twelve, naïve,
and the summers were long,
when birds seemed to hum
in rhythm with the silent passing clouds.
You touched me there,
where the skin smelled of the sun,
and told me of a fate
only we could have foreseen.
We were nineteen, queer,
and the rain fell for four straight days,
when you said it was your destiny
to place yourself beside me.
It was a fragile year, challenging disease,
when we were each all of twenty-eight,
when the shell that encased us
seemed to crack at the bottom.
We could get married, we thought then,
even though the Bible apparently said no.
And the idea that two men could get married,
one day, remained the sweetest yearning.
Time had worn us out,
and there came to be an uneasy space
between what was yours
and what was definitely not mine.
(It wasn’t mine, because all I had was you.)
I was verging on forty, and so were you,
when we thought it was our story
that bound us tightly together.
The empty vase became full again with flowers.
You cracked a smile, still naïve,
the most tender I had ever seen in years,
and told me to hang on.
We were almost there.
We were there then and we are here now.
The skin still smells of that sun from long ago
and I can hear the birds humming again,
a difficult history foretold, lived and repeated.
(It is mine now, because I still have you.)
Ramon Loyola is the author of The Measure of Skin (Vagabond Press, 2018). An Australian-based, Philippines-born writer of poems, fiction and non-fiction, his work has appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Rambutan Literary, and Gargouille, among other journals.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Write a love poem.