Poems About Regret

Regret by Michael R. Burch Regret, a bitter ache to bear . . . once starlight languished in your hair . . . a shining there as brief as rare. Regret . . . a pain I chose to bear . . . unleash the torrent of your hair . . . and show me once again? how rare. Published by The HyperTexts and The Chained Muse White Goddess by Michael R. Burch White in the shadows I see your face, unbidden. Go, tell Love it is commonplace; tell Regret it is not so rare. Our love is not here though you smile, full of sedulous grace. Lost in darkness, I fear the past is our resting place. Published by Carnelian The Stake by Michael R. Burch Love, the heart bets, if not without regrets, will still prove, in the end, worth the light we expend mining the dark for an exquisite heart. Published by The Lyric If by Michael R. Burch If I regret fire in the sunset exploding on the horizon, then let me regret loving you. If I forget even for a moment that you are the only one, then let me forget that the sky is blue. If I should yearn in a season of discontentment for the vagabond light of a companionless moon, let dawn remind me that you are my sun. If I should burn?one moment less brightly, one instant less true? then with wild scorching kisses, inflame me, inflame me, inflame me anew. The Effects of Memory by Michael R. Burch A black ringlet curls to lie at the nape of her neck, glistening with sweat in the evaporate moonlight ... This is what I remember now that I cannot forget. And tonight, if I have forgotten her name, I remember: rigid wire and white lace half-impressed in her flesh ... our soft cries, like regret, ... the enameled white clips of her bra strap still inscribe dimpled marks that my kisses erase ... now that I have forgotten her face. Villanelle: Because Her Heart Is Tender by Michael R. Burch for Beth She scrawled soft words in soap: "Never Forget," Dove-white on her car's window, and the wren, because her heart is tender, might regret it called the sun to wake her. As I slept, she heard lost names recounted, one by one. She wrote in sidewalk chalk: "Never Forget," and kept her heart's own counsel. No rain swept away those words, no tear leaves them undone. Because her heart is tender with regret, bruised by razed towers' glass and steel and stone that shatter on and on and on and on, she stitches in wet linen: "NEVER FORGET," and listens to her heart's emphatic song. The wren might tilt its head and sing along because its heart once understood regret when fledglings fell beyond, beyond, beyond ... its reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on. She writes in adamant: "NEVER FORGET" because her heart is tender with regret. Published by Neovictorian/Cochlea Double Trouble by Michael R. Burch The villanelle is trouble: it’s like you’re on the bubble of beginning to see double. It’s like you’re on the Hubble when the lens begins to wobble: the villanelle is trouble. It’s like you’re Barney Rubble scratching itchy beer-stained stubble because you’re seeing double. Then your lines begin to gobble up the good rhymes, and you hobble. The villanelle is trouble, just like getting sloshed in the pub’ll begin to make you babble because you’re seeing double. Because the form is flubbable and is really not that loveable, the villanelle is trouble: it’s like you’re seeing double. Lucifer, to the Enola Gay by Michael R. Burch Go then, and give them my meaning so that their teeming streets become my city. Bring back a pretty flower— a chrysanthemum, perhaps, to bloom if but an hour, within a certain room of mine where the sun does not rise or fall, and the moon, although it is content to shine, helps nothing at all. There, if I hear the wistful call of their voices regretting choices made or perhaps not made in time, I can look back upon it and recall, in all its pale forms sublime, still Death will never be holy again. Published by Romantics Quarterly Absence by Michael R. Burch Christ, how I miss you!, though your parting kiss is still warm on my lips. Now the floor is not strewn with your stockings and slips and the dishes are all stacked away. You left me today ... and each word left unspoken now whispers regrets. Having Touched You by Michael R. Burch What I have lost is not less than what I have gained. And for each moment passed like the sun to the west, another remained, suspended in memory like a flower in crystal so that eternity is but an hour, and fall is no longer a season but a state of mind. I have no reason to wait; the wind does not pause for remembrance or regret because there is only fate and chance. And so then, forget... Forget we were utterly happy a day. That day was my lifetime. Before that day I was empty and the sky was grey. You were the sunshine: the sunshine that gave me life. I took root and I grew. Now the touch of death is like a terrible knife, and yet I can bear it, having touched you. Marsh Song by Michael R. Burch Here there is only the great sad song of the reeds and the silent herons, wraithlike in the mist, and a few drab sunken stones, unblessed by the sunlight these late sixteen thousand years, and the beaded dews that drench strange ferns, like tears collected against an overwhelming sadness. Here the marsh exposes its dejectedness, its gutted rotting belly, and its roots rise out of the earth’s distended heaviness, to claw hard at existence, till the scars remind us that we all have wounds, and I ... I have learned again that living is despair as the herons cleave the placid, dreamless air. Originally published by The Lyric