Beli labod vseh mest

Love, in this summer night, do you recall
Midnight, and Venice, and those skies of June
Thick-sown with stars, when from the still lagoon
We glided noiseless through the dim canal?
A sense of some belated festival
Hung round us, and our own hearts beat in tune
With passionate memories that the young moon
Lit up on dome and tower and palace wall.
We dreamed what ghosts of vanished loves made part
Of that sweet light and trembling, amorous air.
I felt in those rich beams that kissed your hair,
Those breezes, warm with bygone lovers' sighs-
All the dead beauty of Venice in your eyes,
All the old loves of Venice in my heart.

John Hay

White swan of cities, slumbering in thy nest
So wonderfully built among the reeds
Of the lagoon, that fences thee and feeds,
As sayeth thy old historian and thy guest!
White water-lily, cradled and caressed
By ocean streams, and from the silt and weeds
Lifting thy golden filaments and seeds,
Thy sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest!
White phantom city, whose untrodden streets
Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting
Shadows of palaces and strips of sky;
I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets
Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting
In air their unsubstantial masonry.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

man made myths
limping lovers
a cradle for folly.

Suck them in and puff-up
long dead hopes

This surf ever-churns fantasy
as dog krap nurtures nice tomorrows

"REALITY PROHIBITED ON OCEAN FRONT WALK!"

We find love each sunny morning.
Under this grime exists a naive purity
like the forth face of God
on the brink of a new daybreak.

And, peeling-back this foreskin of fraud
we sometimes glimpse a pink and pretty self.

God bless you Venice
It hurts to stay here
but where else could I
again hope to glimpse my true self?

Dolan Andrews