Often, one young in ripened youth will fall in love
With such a glowing heart to flutter at fair
Red lips, to meet and touch another sensitively enough,
To look and dream in eyes so rare,

Turning to take the others' hands
Floating as a stream into trickling tears
Like a flower with dew on finest strands.
Their golden hair, caught by the luminous moon, appears

Now mirrored like their own reflected faces
Beaming, following each other in each other's dream,
Understanding the beauty and innocence that graces
Where they meet in a startling gleam.

Entering a non-ageing youth of whispered time
The lovers' hearts entwine to rhyme.


©Jack Aylward
(Published in the Scotia Review magazine, no.24 edition, Summer 2001).

Lights lie flashing their sirens with the opening of the dawn;
In the sun streaked streets the artists mix their
Painted faces with oiled pigments;
The dusts of the streets, the dust of the leaves that burn with
The cold and rust with the heat disperse with
The knotted storms that rope the
Blazing frosted earth that lies there forever escaping into air.

Luminous yellow and flamed coloured red are streaming like
The moon and sun reversing and crossing each
Other in a street of luminous people
Where the warmth of great passion hangs in perfumed bottles,
Where people are beautiful in their young
Youth, people arranged like flowers
Burning with ripened love, soft and delicate in innocence.

The Eiffel Tower, the pinpoint of our dreams lies open as a free
Flamed metallic torch that ferments with its iron
Emotions; an almost Romanesque
Renaissance coloured with the Millennium stars that rocket into
The sky then stay for a while turning into dust
And becoming our ashes as we
Summon on again to the fires of our morning lovers we had left.

©Jack Aylward