The Tin Man

The tin man is cold, stone cold,

he who recently chose happiness over a brain,

not heeding the wizard’s warning, hearts

not practical until they can be made unbreakable,

but he insisted, and as Dorothy clicked her heels

together, “there’s no place like home,” and vanished

in a swirl of glitter, he felt his warm heart break.

Within weeks, he was unable to bear it any longer,

and welcomed the Noon King’s turning him to stone,

cold hard stone, awaiting Dorothy’s return, loving her,

all of them, waiting, knowing she would come, all perhaps

but the tin man, hopeful, but doubtful, rejected in love,

heartbroken, forgetting that “a heart is not judged by how much

you love, but by how much you are loved by others,”

even as Dorothy fought her way back from Kansas through the tangle

of destruction Oz had become, risking it all for the love of a tin man,

a scarecrow straw-stuffed, and a cowardly lion wearing his medal,

a yellow brick road from Munchkin Land, and an Emerald kingdom.