Give her a chance

There is a risk when you open up your heart,
a risk that when you start along the path of
saying how you care – a risk, an fundamental chance
that twists of viscous fate will rule the day;
and while you tremble as you say those simple words
which might expose your harried soul, doubt may
pave the way in words to teeter in a seething mind,
or perhaps excite concupiscence in kind.

There’s risk in being blind where arrows fall,
there’s risk to fire them in the air at all before
you’re sure your aim is true, and where the heart
at which you loose them wears a guise enamoured
by the prize of love’s bequest, you’re unsurpassed.
Though beware, sharpened arrows fall with little care
to render pain, and pain unnamed is still decisive pain
to cancel out the gain of frail surmise.

There’s risk to take no risk at all. There’s risk in an appalling
bleakness of no dare, no aspiration only fear of ridicule,
rejection, condemnation. If that’s your
contemplation you deserve to fail; now look, she’s
sitting sweetly there, a winsome smile, a casual glance,
she stifles stares she has the guile, ask her up to
dance. To think of failure means you’ll surely fail,
give her a chance to show you how she cares.
© I.D. Carswell