Night Mistress

Night mistress
Come quickly darkness
Hide this servant from the eyes
Of Deadly light
Come mistress
Fondle me
In your entwining arms
Sooth me with winds of fantasy
Blind my despair with your dark caresses
Come quickly Night
And sleep wiith me
In our bed of lonliness
Away from the inquiring day
Bare yourself to me
Let me rest in your brief ecstacy
Come quickly Night
Share with me
Your all consuming despair
Come quickly night-my mistress

all souls day

prayers for loved souls to purge their passing
reveal our grief  this all souls day
the earth gives up its dead to-night
waiting to be received-
carrying marzipan skeletons
to place on their tombs we bring our offerings
of water, wine, oil and grain
sit and eat with them beside us
sharing our lives with them again-

i begin to recite the prayers for the dead
with the cross, the book, and sword
promising salvation and the cleansing of  sins
of those whom we this day commemorate
to pass from their darkness to eternal light


"But though I have wept and fasted,wept and prayed."
T.S.Eliot

black confessions
whispered to a silver cross 
shoulders turned away
from paradise 
completes the superstition

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Joseph A Farina is a retired lawyer in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. An award winning poet. Several of his poems have been published in  Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, Ascent ,Subterranean  Blue  and in   The Tower Poetry Magazine, Inscribed, The Windsor Review, Boxcar Poetry Revue , and appears in the anthologies   Sweet Lemons: Writings with a Sicilian Accent,  cabadian Italians at Table,  Witness  from Serengeti Press and Tamaracks: Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century . He has had poems published in the U.S. magazines   Mobius, Pyramid Arts, Arabesques, Fiele-Festa, Philadelphia Poets and   Memoir (and)   as well as in Silver Birch Press   “Me, at Seventeen”   Series. He has had two books of poetry published— The Cancer Chronicles   and   The Ghosts of Water Street .

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If you liked this story, perhaps you’ll enjoy these other works by Joseph Farina published in The Chamber: “fever planes”, “simulacrum”, and “what we leave behind”, “Nightwalker” , “The Jackal People”, “Shadows Flowering”, and “incense and white wine”. Search The Chamber for older works by Joseph Farina.