Ghazal: The Love Generation

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Did we really call ourselves "the Love Generation"?
Our aim was to trade our parents' prison
garb for petals we stole from a rose.

Jump upside down in handcuffs, sang Dylan.
We twined so many flowers in our chains
their afterimage painted our vision rose.

We stayed up all night erecting castles
of smoke and music. Nothing of them remained
when we woke in the park as the sun rose.

We became refugees on the road to a future
obscured by dust the convoys' wheels raised.
When youth and luck ran out, we grew morose.

The stairway that ended in mid-air was the one
we wanted to climb. Stepping off was poetry,
hesitating at the edge hopelessly prose.

Trusting the air was our way of flying.
Falling, we'd leave in the pages of the world,
for more faithful generations, a pressed rose.