In the Valley of Decision, on the terrace,
where choices converge,
in a basket, rots fruit
from the tree of knowledge and strife,
that grows near the home of happiness,
on society’s verge,
as she sailed away to navigate
the ocean’s reefs–
full of life.

In the custom of the country,
in this village,
manners are cold,
while in the depths of the ocean,
the heat of battles and might,
A summer-long tale of warmth,
her story someone extolled.
The age of innocence–naivety in
a world sarcastically polite.

A spinster’s existence they claim
when she, solitary and wise,
with a daughter at the front,
fighting in ink, this war’s facade,
glimpses at the moon
and sees daunting romantic skies,
and the old maid’s tale is printed
when choices are made.

A mother’s recompense
is love’s enduring trance-like dance,
as the children’s laughter falls
like a waterfall on rocks when at play.
and twilight sleep is a happenstance,
but she’s not taken by chance.
War is raging, a river of punctuation, bracketed,
an inkturesque display.

As the gods arrive and sit in theater seats,
society tells tales of the crime.
Through each chapter, she wrote the truth,
and what a literary spree,
of the buccaneers’ adventure,
but she never bought that narrative line.
Oh the stories untold, wrong time, wrong text,
wrong sex, except when given free…

In the adulteration of words,
will her legacy ever gleam?
Each title, a portal to something old
made into something new,
Whispers of characters, stained black,
a dream within a dream?
To ashes all, if only she wrote for intent
of fortunes to pursue.