PALMETTO POEM: Lady in White

Image credit: Lady in a white dress, Franz Dvorak, 1927.

By John L. Byrne

The moon and lightning bugs dance
between tombstones. Leaves wrinkle
in the sighing Charleston breeze.
A lady, draped in white, drifts
just beyond the gate, in search of love
or someone to light her ghostly cigarette,
somewhere between the fresh graves
and the old; between our world and the dead.
She floats, lingers far above the steeples,
the streetlamps. Can the breathing sea
sense her longing, here where it opens up?
Where the mouths of the Cooper and the Ashley
rivers kiss, out in the harbor, where they spread
wide into endless surging water? Oh, to be tethered
for eternity to a timeless place! To be one of countless
souls latched to a filled-in land mass, long enough
and loudly enough to be given a name

Nebraska native John L. Byrne is a writer in Charleston who received a master’s degree of fine arts in poetry from the College of Charleston. He currently works as a manager at Buxton Books. His work can be found in Roanoke Review and pamplemousse magazine. 

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