Poetry | Summer 2022

The Golden Key & Belle’s Hand: A Romance

by Alex Light

You’ve lost your golden key

Envious until green

Of its adventures you’re thinking

Searching until your joy is forgotten. 

The key’s real journey was a study in replication:

The world made keyholes everywhere it went

In every door, in the sky, in the tree, in a woman

But the key’s only a shell.

It’s yearning for your hand again:

Its mind cobalt remembrance

The worlds lost upon it

Wanting so to be owned, 

That all joy of the journey is forgotten

Every way that the world opens

Seems an empty shell.

This brief spell

Is drawing a silk string of distance

To your heart’s windowsill–

You think up its adventures;

It can and it will

Make the wind, keenly felt,

Play music upon your empty hand.

Union and distance by eternity arranged

Into an emotional Rembrandt:

Golden Key touching a Holding Hand.