top of page
Writer's picturePhilip Dundas

love poems


moon


That night⎯ the night he came back.

Standing at the door,

saying he wanted to stay,

‘Could I? Please.’

Uncertain for a moment, I demurred,

but turned my back on him

under the moon.


That night was early summer

a scent of cow parsley in the air ⎯

the night I lost him.

But his return that night

was a reckoning,

a tally of the many nights before,

when I sought him

stretching my arms out towards his silence.

In the morning he’d be gone,

the damask

spread over us,

torn ⎯


So that night, under the moon

when I sent him

back into the dark,

a bird in the trees

somewhere,

ceased its song.


Untitled


half-lit glimpses of you,

like broken shards of mirror,

pierce my dreams

and hang like baubling sequins

in my thoughts.


a notion of you,

swimming far out in a blackened sea,

leaving our shape pressed into the sand,

spoor and sperm and sea and salt.

A voice calls out,

‘Beware your shadows’.

lights glint from the glass,

and I creep away,


we were

riding high on autumn winds;

sailing, thrashing, whip-tailed kites

mastered only by the strings of our conception.

Your silent savagery⎯

once soft as gentle tributaries

now a torrent of shards,

a thousand mirrors cannot own.


Antonio’s Triptych


i. Orsino’s yard

you have written out

this pact we signed,

designed by you,

like some stagey conceit,

a play within a play,

now diminished and consigned

to scraps of script ⎯


ii. ariel

I lost much then, not brave enough

to taunt my own end,

we wagered and you won on the thrill

of my submission,

while I hid

between moments

of service and content


iii. caliban

There is only one thing

now I want,

the breaking down

of your beauty,

the fragments of our love diseased,

the caves of your distance

lit with despair.


23 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Commentaires


bottom of page