Literary (Submission): On the Encomium of Aristophanes
That night,
I looked at you for the second time.
I remembered thinking
how beautiful you looked,
how your face lit up when you smiled.
I remembered
the wrinkles on your eyes as you stared at me,
the gentleness of your hands holding mine.
I kept thinking
why we did not work out the first time.
More than two thousand years ago,
A wise man said
In his speech to praise Eros
To praise love
That we once lived by twos
In one body
With two faces peering
Out of one giant head
And four arms and four legs
Called children
Of the sun and the moon and the earth
And these children
Cut in half
Scattered by great floods
Cursed to look for each other
In their lifetime
In all their lifetimes
And I found you
My other half
A soulmate, you might say,
Standing so close to me
And I found
You had your own soulmate
The morning I looked at you
For the first time
You looked at someone else
Maybe you weren't my other half
But the first time
We looked
at each other
That night
It was the second time
I fell for you
We knew we wouldn't last
And maybe we weren't
Made
For each other
Weren't destined for one another
We decided
That we needn't be halves of a whole
In our first lives
To love
And be loved
This 'love' did end
On a sad note
And we saw it end
With tears
And smiles
With broken cheers
And hopeless cries
Twice
We loved
Hoped that
That wise man
Was wrong
Maybe we were those halves
Meant to be one
But we knew deep inside
And we loved anyway.
