This is my attempt at a Blakean pastiche of Ah! Sunflower.
Bel Amara, Princess of Light
Who seeks to be forever known
Seeking after Eternity’s sight
Where the darkness of night time has flown
Where she shines in brilliance like starlight
And her stories the shaman now tells
Arise like the sun after long night
Bel Amara impossibly dwells
A yellow brick, a metaphor of time
A time for metaphors that mark the way
Oh Dorothy! Is there nothing else sublime
Sublimity is more than bricks you say
That’s deep, you bitch. Just give it to me straight
As straight as simple lies or simple storms
Your wonderland is strange and yes, you’re late
And yet you deviate from all the norms
Your deviance, a holy trinity
Becomes the way you live when you are lost
So, trade it in for silver liberty
And pray to god you never learn the cost
The cost of every yellow brick you find
Is paid by someone else’s simple mind.
I guess she didn’t know she broke my heart
I wonder if she thinks I broke hers too
Both time and space had pulled us far apart
The way that time and space are bound to do
I guess her love was just a metaphor
I wonder if our poetry was wrong
The verses we composed became a chore
And we could not complete our little song
We turn to face reality and find
Our love, our hearts, our song could never last
We turn to words to which we are resigned
Our love is words that linger in the past
The hearts we broke eventually will fade
To times we shun and spaces we have made.
We tend to long for time that's disappeared
Although we know we'll never get it back
It's gone. It's gone, exactly as we feared
A train that travels down a rusty track
The rusty track of time is still traversed
By everyone, regardless of their age
A play of destination, unrehearsed
Performed upon a creaky wooden stage
If time was just a sonnet, who would write
The little song that everyone must sing
But, out of tune or even out of sight
We know the final couplet time will bring
From time to time the similes get old
Like grapes that turn to wine or bread to mold.