A Dystopian Love Song

I thought to write you a love song when the fields were green When I look at us now, Scavenging, surviving this barren landscape Love feels a soft thing from long ago.

I remember looking at drawings with you; Talking about expressions and nuances over cups of fine earl grey tea There are no drawings on walls now Our world has long changed.

Now we hide in the dark in an old house shutters down, lights out eating three day old meat We are always hungry, always scared.
holding each other for comfort.
This was not the love song I had in mind.

I dream of being the girl with flowing long locks who scowls like a petulant child in love I must be satisfied with stroking your face as we sleep Your body is covered in dirt and old wounds from when they last hunted us.

My father taught me that love was a luxury something for the privileged to worry about when they did not fear hunger or capture when there was time to gossip and linger over forgotten affections.

Crouching in the dark we have no space for these things Your eyes are bright with fear My heart pounds with the damnest will to survive.
But there is more as well, surely.

For there were others who feared, and others who wanted to live.
It is love that has kept us.
Our love that has changed, like gazing at Rembrandt two hundred years later Or at old lovers on canvas and finding a murmur of recognition

So I write you now, in between the barren and the dead Where there are no more paintings on the walls That you will keep me, and I you.

Carol M