Moonlight Portrait

By Maria Osorio

Moonlight portrait is a poem about how two souls become one.

The feeling in both hearts 
was something new, 
was something pure.
Something they have given up in the past.  

They bared their thoughts,
shared everything with each other. 
Now they were only one soul, 
they were complete. 

The emptiness in her heart was gone. 
With every word and giggle his pain was vanishing.

In the cold dark night 
their bodies became one,
like a unique portrait. 
The moonlight hitting her face,
the breeze moving his curly hair.

That night they found
what most people never do in their lifetime.
Was it real?
Was it going to last?
They didn’t know. 
They didn’t care.
They just hold on to that moment.
That cold dark night,
that changed their lives. 

Process

In our weekly sessions, my mentor Barbara and I read poems by Latin American women. In one of our meetings, she had an exercise where I had to choose my favorite line from a poem. I remember choosing, “They bared their thoughts” because it caught my attention how intimate it was, how it demonstrated a deep connection that wasn’t just physical. The idea was to develop my own poem including that line. I had a short time to do my first draft since it was just about expressing what I feel about the line without overthinking it. After that, we organized it, changed some grammatical errors and ended up finding a name that did it justice.