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In Dublin, A Woman’s Voice
Third Iteration
Dedicated to W. M.
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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, is it a demon deity? It ceaselessly calls to its thralls, poets above all.
Bestowed with a halo, as if enslaved, that first beloved eviscerates to be free of it.
As to 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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Prolix with every direction under the sun.
Its diurnal arc is not an arch of triumph. Nor is it some supernal yoke of defeat.
It is the passage to every future such encounter with beloveds beyond count.
The sum of a life, they are but the skeletons for an archetype,
The welling of love into the swells of ecstasy.
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In our lonely apartness from partners,
The trigger of epiphany is pulled by our admission
It is the spirit of loving which is our truest beloved,
And none of the sinewed who would rather die than be embraced.
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Forgive them, and be grateful. It is they who introduced us to God.
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Steven Golden
May 15th, 16th, 2026
Green Valley, Arizona
stevengoldenpoetry 