The Gestures You Make

Marion Strobel

You have no beauty now:
Only the gestures you make
Are intimate with suffering
For the sake
of beauty;

Only your gestures are
Heavy-lidded with the pain
Of touching beauty to lose
It again
and again…

Your gestures, that are as
Purposeless as butterflies,
Winging across the knowledge
In your eyes—
purposeless,

Brittle with loss—yet still
Curved sweetly, sweetly they croon:
“We may touch beauty again
Very soon—
very soon!”