as the midnight blue sky grew thicker and bigger.
It was seven years later and the lady still waited,
out of sorts and unbalanced and not yet abated.
Fearing to hear word that her lover was ill,
or worst still he had perished out there in the swill.
She had put on her cloak in the black of the night,
right under their noses she had passed out of sight.
Bright though she was, cunning she was too,
she felt the storm brewing and could smell the salt air,
through the gardens she hastened,
down the stone steps with care.
Snaring her hair on a branch as she ran,
she pulled at it roughly with one pallid white hand.
Once reaching the cliff she fell to her knees,
seizing the moment in the nights nipping breeze:
'Why nothing?' She sniffed and she sighed and she sobbed.
'Robbed of contact with you is too much to bear!
You must have made port either here or there...
why no letter have I yet received from your hand?'
She thought of the papers up near her night-stand,
in the gloom of the moon they lay on her floor,
all crumpled and torn they were strewn by the door.
She had written so many yet still they remained,
stubborn of the seasons they sat there unchanged;
unopened, unread, since the day they were written
yet life's changed so much since the time she was smitten.
An intense crack of lightning drew a vein in the sky
and she gazed out to sea with her watery eyes,
'Oh envelope me!' she screamed with a bellowing cry
and for once in her life she didn't ask why.
She knew what she wanted
and that want was to die.
And right out to sea,
in that eye of that storm,
her lover was fighting to find his way home.
She climbed to her feet and took off her cloak.
She turned right around for one last look at the smoke
from the chimney up high where the pigeons were nesting
and with one hand sat firmly upon her pale breast,
she tested her nerve as she pushed off away backwards,
down to the rocks where she laid shattered in tatters.
***
Purple of night gave way to peach of the dawn,
he swore he'd be back on a fresh autumn morn.
He shored up his boat and breathed in the air
before such a commotion led him to stare
to the bottom of the cliff with the crowd standing there,
wailing and crying were the women on mass,
so the lover, he wandered to the edge of the grass.
'Excuse me good sir, can you please shed some light?'
'I can my young man on this here awful plight.
It is Lady Julia Sutton, she alone in the night
did come down the steps to the edge of the cliff
and threw herself off, right into the abyss.'
'Lady Julia Sutton!?' the lover exclaimed,
pushing past all the people to see her laid stained
upon the ragged rocks as the sea licked her hair
he fell to his knees and held her with care.
'Oh my cherub, my angel! My one and true love,
I covet your peace up in Heaven above.
I said my return to you would be true,
but you doubted me Julia and now I ask who
has to deal with the heartache for a lover
gone deep...
Now my incomplete soul will forever seek refuge.
My incomplete heart is forever forlorn
and adorned with the loss of a lover so fused,
now I crumble with you
in the cool morning dew.
© 2015 AJG
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