Beauty

Beauty lives in a cottage.
She hides in the faces of clocks,
and shows no sign of age.

She stays hidden among the sage
bushes that sleep beneath the locks
of luxurious golden wheat beside the cottage.

She watches through the pages
of old books as a mother begins to rock
her child. Drifting to sleep, age

does not matter, for the page
that rides horses. They talk
to the boy while he sleeps in her cottage.

Does beauty have a name? Or did some mage
curse she who is lovely with endless walk
ing of the earth? Is she cursed to not age

and therefore must watch life cage
what she held dear? Does the cock
that crows in the morning on top of the cottage

frighten her? On the cliff’s edge
she waits for the sun to set, and to lock
her into yet another night in the cottage.
For the sun has abandoned one – beauty—who does not age.