Love Has a Southern Flavor
Michael R. Burch
Love has a Southern flavor: honeydew,
ripe cantaloupe, the honeysuckle’s spout
we tilt to basking faces to breathe out
the ordinary, and inhale perfume ...
Love’s Dixieland-rambunctious: tangled vines,
wild clematis, the gold-brocaded leaves
that will not keep their order in the trees,
unmentionables that peek from dancing lines ...
Love cannot be contained, like Southern nights:
the constellations’ dying mysteries,
the fireflies that hum to light, each tree’s
resplendent autumn cape, a genteel sight ...
Love also is as wild, as sprawling-sweet,
as decadent as the wet leaves at our feet.
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Mike’s notes: “Amusingly, ‘Love Has a Southern Flavor’ got me banned from the poetry forum Eratosphere, which I now call Erratic Sphere. When I posted the poem, I was instructed by various poetry experts not to use the word ‘love‘ in a love poem, and to avoid abstract language and the very mild and understated personification. When I pointed out that Erato was the abstract personification of love poetry, I was banned for life with no trial and no explanation!“
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Word-Bird adds: “Poetry forum experts can be rather eristic entities, more inclined to obstruct than to assist. At Well Met, we shall always sit comfortably with the true Erato.”
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Michael R. Burch is one of the world’s most-published poets, with over 11,500 publications, including poems that have gone viral. This does not include self-published writings; if self-published writings were included, Mike’s total publications would be well over 20,000. Mike has also had 74 poems set to music by composers, from swamp blues to classical. He is also a longtime editor, publisher, and translator of Jewish Holocaust poetry and poems about the Trail of Tears, Hiroshima, Ukraine, the Nakba, and school shootings. Mike’s full biography may be read here.
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