When She Falls To Her Knees/ poem by Victoria Sullivan

Ninety minuets ago, I met the Count of Monte Christo.
 
I entered this life a redhead but may depart a blonde. 
The crises of life are not catnip and overalls, 
but rather the violence of a thousand petty lies:
little acts of subterfuge, 
mice in the walls, 
funerals in the hills, 
and all the pretty girls taking off their pinafores. 

You think you have strange dreams, 
just step into the cauldron of mine. 
every day windfall, fire and desire, 
every day rain blankets fields of fallen bodies. 

You: earthquakes, tornadoes, floods,
I call on the vengeance of Mother Nature, 
somehow we have trampled her underfoot
like a discarded garment, 
like a woman who has lost her charms. 

But Mother Nature is in touch with banshees and furies, 
and she will let them loose when the time is right. 
Ninety minutes after the minuets stop, the dogs are silent, 
You will all feel the roaring in your ears – 

That’s the time that Mother Nature will fall to her knees 
in tears, clutching at the beautiful earth she created, 
now, at last expiring.                   

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Victoria Sullivan is both a poet and playwright.  She is a member of the Woodstock Fringe Playwrights Unit and of the American Renaissance Theatre Company.  She performs her poetry with jazz musicians at music venues in the Hudson Valley, and is the “poet laureate” of the Woodstock Roundtable on WDST 100.1 fm. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, several anthologies and in four chapbooks, including WHEN I WASN’T LOOKING (available on Amazon).