Love's Disciple Poem by James Walter Orr

In ages past, when the evening star
shone down from an azure sky,
it carried warmth from the goddess of love:
love shone from her twinkling eye.

Now the warmth is gone, and the stardust’s cold:
a goddess’ demise brings pain.
There’s a vacant void in the heavenly skies,
where Venus used to reign.

Oh, where did she go from her star-cast home,
where she lived in the glowing past?
Could she have died like a mortal soul?
Does only her memory last?

This won’t be true, oh; it can’t be true,
for a goddess never dies.
Somewhere she roams around the earth
in an earthly girl’s disguise.

If it should be true that a goddess, too,
like a mortal passes away,
and leaves no sign of a past domain,
but a lifeless lump of clay:

Oh, let the men of a modern world
bemoan the loss of her worth.
May the winds of hell send a tidal wave
of anguish around the earth.

Let the muted sound of the golden horn
and the muffled beat of the drum
wail a mournful dirge to the evening star
where the goddess has wandered from.

The wayward way of the wandering ones
toward the whispering will-o-the-wisp
is as endless as time and as timeless as love,
and as joyful and painful and crisp.

As the errant breeze murmurs through the trees,
and the leaves do a moonlit dance,
the voice still calls through the earth-bound halls,
and the sound soothes to a trance.

The magnet sound makes a magic mood
that draws toward the lodestone queen,
and the addict bows to the beckoning light:
elusive and faint, but seen.

When the sprinkled dust of the evening star
drifts down from the stellar height,
and enchantment-powders a lone disciple
in fragments of splintered light –

the soul recharged and the search renewed
in a quest that will never cease,
‘till the sudden sight of the hidden throne
that can bring a searcher peace.