Na/GloPoWriMo Day 22 challenges us to write a poem engaging another art form.  For me, it took but a moment to realize I would take on Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture.  Many reasons behind this I suppose, but, the largest of these are Princess 1 and Princess 2:

Hope In Love Becomes A Battlefield
by Michael Romani

Success can be a dangerous thing
It can take away the reasons
That we live and love and sing
Making us forget the many seasons

Of our lives that have passed by
That that make us so happy
With memories of ample supply
When love never needed a reason why

I remember that Spring day
Taking my little girls to see art
I still feel those feelings in every way
Showing them the designs of the heart

Encouraging the dreams they might dream
In numbers and sculptures of play
Where hope is LOVE and still it seems
Paint by number sequences don't get in the way

Slightly tilted, she played inside the O
Never fearing exile or letting go
Her older sister traced the patterns anew
Entranced by the Didone type in green, red and blue

We thought then that we had what we needed
I'll never forget the day their eyes pleaded
And my identity as Daddy was stripped away
Now I spend soulless nights without a word to say

That be must be a little how Robert Indiana felt
At the end of it all as his life had been dealt
Burnt down like an abandoned attic of memory
Standing in the shadow of almost anonymity

We eat; we drink; we casually live and die
Like a jilted American dream, we wonder why
The conflicts of life prophetically looming
Come so fast as to be apocalyptically dooming

All of my aspirations to be as a family man
Post-divorce now and doing all that I can
To keep my memories of LOVE alive
Feeling kind of homeless in dumpster dive

Played out in my mind like scattegories 
Unsettled as can be in my once fixed categories
Once finding hope in LOVE but no longer
I can only pray their hearts are stronger

(c)  April 22, 2019  Michael Romani
All Rights Reserved