Garden

You first met him in a garden as the moon was rising fast,
but you're not the girl you were then, so stop living in the past.
You're a soldier now, and soldiers don't consort with men in black:
they wait, rifles at the ready, for the signal to attack.

Years ago you took his picture for remembrance of his smile --
bright and sunny, like the golden fields of wheat that stretch for miles --
but now those fields are choked with bodies on the gallows that he built.
Burn the photograph to ashes. Drive your knife in to the hilt.

❦