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In Dublin, A Woman’s Voice
Third Iteration
“In Petto,” Dedicated To Three
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It is an excelling French restaurant
In an old city quarter not far from St. Stephen’s Green.
I sit under a canopy, cordoned off.
All around in the alley, shoulder to shoulder covivialists
Speak incessantly, or stand side by side drinking.
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Bedecked in evening dress, I see her strike an entrance.
The red and gold canopy seems her baldacchino.
Surreptitiously, I eye her high heels as she passes to a table behind me.
Shortly after, she is joined by a woman impeccably prosaic.
As they speak, only the one voice insinuates musically.
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I am bewitched enough to do the unthinkable.
When her friend excuses herself, no doubt a touch
Inebriated, for seconds I sit at their table in earnest.
“From behind me, so unaware, how beautifully you speak.”
“Your conversation is not overheard. I do not know French.”
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She smiles slightly, wryly. “French? No.” She confides in me:
“My friend and I were speaking Romanian.”
My own smile answers her nervously, but also covers my retreat.
At the door, before leaving she turns around to find my eyes.
She bestows a look of radiance, one proposing the promise of love.
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Coda
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Love…A daemon? A deity? Ceaselessly it calls to its thralls, poets above all.
Bestowed with a halo, as if enslaved, that first beloved eviscerates
To be free of it. Pity the innocent lover. Pray there is a teacher at hand,
A man who is all men, a woman who is all women. Pray they intervene
To show the severed one, that loner, the not so lonely crossroads—
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Prodigal with sign posts proposing every direction under the sun.
Its diurnal arc is not an arch of triumph. Nor is it a yoke of servility.
A mystery, it is an uncharted road, and the lead toward encounters
With beloveds beyond count. A life’s summation, they form the skeleton
For an archetype, the welling of love into ecstasy’s swell.
If let down, left bereft and apart in a place for departure,
Then courageously pull an epiphany’s trigger: Admit,
The spirit named loving itself is the promised beloved.
As for the sinewed who refuse to be embraced,
Forgive them, and be grateful. It is they who introduce us to God.
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Steven Golden
May 15th thru May 30th, 2026
Green Valley, Arizona
stevengoldenpoetry 