Burn, Ovid Poem by Michael Burch

Burn, Ovid
by Michael R. Burch

'Burn Ovid'―Austin Clarke

Sunday School,
Faith Free Will Baptist,1973:
I sat imagining watery folds
of pale silk encircling her waist.
Explicit sex was the day's 'hot' topic
(how breathlessly I imagined hers)
as she taught us the perils of lust
fraught with inhibition.

I found her unaccountably beautiful,
rolling implausible nouns off the edge of her tongue:
adultery, fornication, masturbation, sodomy.
Acts made suddenly plausible by the faint blush
of her unrouged cheeks,
by her pale lips
accented only by a slight quiver,
a trepidation.

What did those lustrous folds foretell
of our uncommon desire?
Why did she cross and uncross her legs
lovely and long in their taupe sheaths?
Why did her breasts rise pointedly,
as if indicating a direction?

Come unto me,
(unto me)
together, we sang,

cheek to breast,
lips on lips,
devout, afire,

my hands
up her skirt,
her pants at her knees:

all night long,
all night long,
in the heavenly choir.

'Sex 101' and 'Burn, Ovid' were written about my experiences during ninth grade at Faith Christian Academy, circa age 14-15. However, these poems were not completed until much later and are in a more mature voice and style than most of my other early poems.



Sex 101
by Michael R. Burch

That day the late spring heat
steamed through the windows of a Crayola-yellow schoolbus
crawling its way up the backwards slopes
of Nowheresville, North Carolina...

Where we sat exhausted
from the day's skulldrudgery
and the unexpected waves of muggy,
summer-like humidity...

Giggly first graders sat two abreast
behind senior high students
sprouting their first sparse beards,
their implausible bosoms, their stranger affections...

The most unlikely coupling—

Lambert,18, the only college prospect
on the varsity basketball team,
the proverbial talldarkhandsome
swashbuckling cocksman, grinning...

Beside him, Wanda,13,
bespectacled, in her primproper attire
and pigtails, staring up at him,
fawneyed, disbelieving...

And as the bus filled with the improbable musk of her,
as she twitched impaled on his finger
like a dead frog jarred to life by electrodes,
I knew...

that love is a forlorn enterprise,
that I would never understand it.



Keywords/Tags: Ovid, god, religion, church, Sunday school, sex, lust, desire, passion, choir, hymn, hymns, devout, devotion, faith, purity, chastity