Like an Arrow

Forest Dwelling — Gotts Island — July 2017 — photograph by Ben Weinberg

in innocence
our troth we pledge,
in time all promises broken.

monuments
as empty as the shells
scattered along the strand.

beauty,
like an arrow,
quivering to the heart.

plucked, we bleed, leaving
naught but the pale,
the gaunt, the shadowcast.

the thorn, the scar
the memory;
carry these.