This poem, ‘Eventually I will miss you forever,’ appears in my book, “Country Songs and Backroad Love Notes” – available on Amazon in paperback or Kindle (link at bottom).
Beneath falling oak leaves and behind
the Second Lutheran Church,
beyond a fuchsia-fused fall sunset and
above Main Street’s hardware store a
second-hand ’74 Plymouth, parked and
bisected by the early moonlight shadow
of the Saturday evening steeple above, has its
interior illuminated by a dashboard radio with
Top 40 tunes softly sent from the towers of
Charm City to the south.
Before you find something
you have to look for it,
and after I’d longingly looked for you
in all the wrong places
and in all of the wrong people,
I rediscovered you
in an early eighties
church hall high school dance
just a stone’s throw from the
that weekend’s upcoming body and blood.
With an old virgin hanging lonely above
and a new one swaying right in front of me,
singing sweet autumn syllables
as soft as early spring,
with twisted fingers and glancing lips,
evening expanding and world closing in
you forgave my trespasses
with a slow swirling slow dance kiss
that either delivered me from,
or aimed me directly at, evil.
The dance floor became
a swirl of marginal swaying sin,
of thoughts of long term love
or a current one night wonder.
Friday night corduroy friction
attempting to ignite a fire, or something else,
the din turned the sanctuary into
a two-story babbling tower.
We exited in a professional DJ recessional
of Hall and Oates and moon and stars,
ending silently in the parking lot at my back corner car
where you shoved your hands deep
in my back-pocket Levi’s, as if digging
for a bottom of the box Cracker Jack prize,
while I paused for a stained glass second,
inhaling oak, Baby Soft, and October.
With arms around your sweater
and chin atop your head,
I had one eye closed to the future and
the other looking towards a
street corner phone booth confessional
while trying desperately
to force myself to forget that
eventually I will miss you forever.
copyright 2016 Steven Harz
Steven Harz Music 
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