This Tool I Clasp, Serena Axel [guided reading books .TXT] 📗

Dear Sweet Maggie


Where am I?
I am a soldier fighting for freedom, now.
I cannot say where… yet I have no freedom.
There is none in this distant land, so harsh and foreign,
so filled with eyes of suspicion and smiling hatred.

War has scarred the earth and laid her open and raw.
Once a paradise, now a hell on earth for so many.
Kept so far from you, my soul screams at night as I lay
here in my bunk with fragmented dreams.
They twist and turn until becoming nightmares.
My God,the nightly shelling!

But now for this moment...
Words of ardor I delivered to you, my sweet, with this
gentler tool I am clasping tightly in my fingers.
It will speak for me; dispel the vicious serpent
that hovers just beyond.

With no fine linen paper, I am reduced to
writing on whatever I can find.
Would that I could whisper my feelings to you
while you linger, next to me on the front porch.
Take me back.
I long to see the pink blush rise and overtake your cheeks.
To smell your sweet perfume that permeates the air around you.


To hold you and kiss forever, never wanting to let you go.
To have you next to me all the while.
I want to have the morning when I wake next to you
and see all your natural untouched beauty.
Please be there.
My heart is in my throat as I envision you
standing on the tarmac.
I have something I need to ask you!

Love now and forever, Andrew


Darling Andrew

I hunger for the words you write, they are my sustenance.
Without them I am like the dry desert sands
that are blown from oasis to oasis.
This war has kept us apart, but know that I am waiting for you,
and in my dreams we are together always.
Never thirsty.
To wake and find I face another day
of trepidation and loneliness,
with people surrounding me.
I see your ruggedly handsome face,
carry it in my mind like a photo kept in my pocket.
Knowing we only had a short time before you
were deployed and doing the simplest of things.
Just being together on the porch swing
holding hands and fantasizing
about the warm spring days of our future.
Walking to the lake where you read to me
from my tattered old book of Yeat’s poetry…

‘O, hurry, where by water,
among the trees,
The delicate-stepping stag
and his lady sigh,
When they have looked upon their images

Would none had ever loved but you and I!
Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed
Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,
When the sun looked out of his golden hood?
O, that none ever loved but you and I!
O hurry to the ragged wood, for there
I will drive all those lovers out and cry
O, my share of the world,
O, yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I.’


Those were our words to lay claim to and grab,
stitched together lovingly into our blanket
covering us in the darkness of the night.
This silly notion that there would be no rings,
just in case you didn’t return making me a widow.
I’ve pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind,
only believing you and I are meant to be
and our love will survive.
You are the sun to my day
and I will not hold back any longer
the words in my heart.

Andrew will you marry me?

All my love, Maggie


Acknowledgment:
The Ragged Wood by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Text: (c) Serena Axel, 2011
Publication Date: 02-14-2011

All Rights Reserved