HAPPILY EVER AFTER

Happily Ever After
Age 24, Durham County, North Carolina, 1968
-- This is one poem, in an autobiographical series of poems, I posted here at WriteSpike. Go to my stories section for others. They are in chronological order. --

Every poet is allowed
his romantic moment
and this is mine

at the age of 24
like a prince in a fairy tale
I had overcome all odds
and won the princess

one Saturday morning
after making love
I lay in bed and felt
my wife's body wrapped around me
as I heard hard rain
hitting the roof
of our small cabin
in the Durham woods

the downpour
was comforting
like a symbol for my life -
I had weathered the storm

it was as though I had been thrown overboard
and landed in a strange place
that felt more like home than home

I had left my warring family,
established myself
in a new southern state,
found an audience for my stories
so disliked in the north,
graduated from college
with an Honors in Creative Writing,
and embarked on photography
to complement my written work -
an art form I had only discovered
after years of searching

not only that
I had my first full-time job
that paid the bills

and of course
no story would be complete
without the damaged princess
whom I rescued and saved

I had married a woman
whose beauty made people stop
when she entered the room
but whose shyness
and deep hurt
of things she could never speak of
meant that as a prince
I would have to bring her back to life

it was a fairy tale ending
and being young,
I did believe in such things

but like all such stories
there were hidden monsters
lurking in the woods

and this fabled ending
was just the beginning