Jay Frankston- Two Poems

THE DEATH MAIDEN

The church bell rings
way off in the distance
and the pealing echoes
through the countryside.
Women in the fields
raise their heads and listen.
The sound is grave
and full of foreboding.
There’s death out there somewhere
crawling into bed
with some unsuspecting soul
who sees her as a beautiful woman
whose body is lithe
whose breasts are firm
and whose loins beckon to be entered.
And she plays with him
and teases him
and makes him full of want.
And when he can stand it no more
he wraps his arms around her
as she wraps her legs around him
and fills him with bliss
till he’s spent.
Then he lies there in her arms
as the death knell rings
way off in the distance
and the women in the fields
cross themselves
and bend to their task
to bring in the harvest
before winter comes.



NOSTALGIA

It glows in the dark
but in the daytime
you can’t see it.
I walk loosely on a carpet of leaves
where the autumn has shed its skin.
There’s an aura about me
a scent of mystical flowers
grown on some hidden bush
during the many seasons gone by.
I breathe deeply
the lingering perfume
and my head is intoxicated with it.
There‘s music coming from
a juke box somewhere in my past
and I hear the old songs
older than 45s
older than 78s.
Songs that were sung
on the street corners of Paris
when I was a child
looking down from the sixth story
window of my prison
wrapping a few loose coins
in a small piece of newspaper
to throw to the lady
with the crying voice
down there
in the courtyard.
And now,
much later,
these songs make me melancholic
and I walk on the golden leaves of autumn
nostalgic, almost,
for what I perceive to have been
“the good old days”.