by Bruce Boston
She sits all alone in a palace of stone
on a planet that circles a dying red sun.
Unlike her sad sisters who soon became crones,
whose bodies are dust and a shovel of bones,
she fashions her youth from a series of clones
who feed in the darkness until they are done.
Her suitors are fiends who seek only to own
--not her life, not her mind, not her soul--
but the secret she holds in a bastion of stone
that keeps age at bay while the centuries run.
Friends are long dead, her name is unknown,
her world is a barren one all sane men shun.
Her beauty's a sin that she cannot atone,
her days are far empty, her passions undone.
She sits all alone in a palace of stone
like an unchanging sculpture of obsidian.
Chill to the bone, she feels the sky moan,
as she waits for the death of the sun.