TAMARA BERYL LATHAM

5816 Brentwood Trace
Brentwood, Tennessee 37027
615-309-8825
t_latham@msn.com

Schizophrenia

Willows bend,
with weight of stressful times,
near the stonewalled garden flanked with light.
Their voice, the wind, whispers joyless notes,
then shrieks the Banshees' song within my head.

Ravens perch,
in lieu of flight, content
to watch as evil wraiths eclipse my mind,
where I, committed, flee the forest maze,
whose rubber tress distinctly scope my gaze,
while raging storms mask full an opiate sun,
then electrify to quell delirium.

Shadows dance,
jump through the artist's palette of tranquil hues,
splashing colors of the spectrum on my thoughts,
which suddenly take form as silhouettes,
the leap in a kaleidoscope of hope.

Jonquils sway,
as images serene direct my feet,
along a snake-like path to garden's edge,
where I, no longer marked
by fleeting, feral glares,
cool and haunting, hard, fixated stares,
view Veronica Sticata, single bloom,
within a Monet landscape titled "Life."

We Two Ships

My heart
beats heavy
with winter and melancholia.

As I envisage
how we two ships,
under a crescent moon,
once moved in sleek beauty
on placid swells,
but, now pass stubbornly,
almost defiantly,
on raging, murky waters.

We lived,
you the Titanic
and I, the Andrea Doria;
doomed from the beginning,
catastrophic at the end,
to gulp one last histrionic breath.

Yet, in that final
ebb and neap,
we know or song
would be swallowed
by the sea,
our wreckage hurled
into its blackness,
and our ghosts,
prisoners locked in iron,
would become its treasures.

All poems copyrighted 2002 by Tamara Beryl Latham.