Tag: euphony

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To Write Poetry Is To Be Distracted      

 

         Let us set the scene,

his shallow voice announces;

 

hands inching though conductor’s motions,

humid air seeping through the gaps between his knuckles,

he tries to our catch our fluttering minds like a child catching fireflies.

 

The stump on which he stands may as well be fifteen years away—

time is of no concern to us

on this late spring day;

 

we have come to write,

to be distracted in the sun by the

              stuff of poets.

 

We are the people who find beauty

in a grain of rice lying on a mottled grey table;

it is the color of a long-awaited peace.

Its muted glow gives rise to thoughts of a

sun-drenched undersea scene.

And the magnitude of the lightly rugged tabletop

speaks to the human condition of infinity.

Naïvely, by attrition.

But aren’t we beautiful?

 

               Let us set the scene,

his shallow voice repeats;

 

and we still don’t catch the words,

his intonations drowned out

by the sounds of our surroundings.

 

How can we listen to the product of poetry,

faced with the lushness around us?

 

This,

         we know,

our writing shows,

         this

         is the stuff of poetry.

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Learning to Lose

You lose yourself between the empty ticking of the clock,

The low-brow knock of tick-tack-tock;

The wayward, strident second hand

Beats to the sound of unmanned wreckage

Inside the holy-water of your heart.

 

You lose yourself between the leaves of sheaves of books,

The smell of well-felled plant-cells planted in antiquity

Permeates the dusty shelves,

And only time will tell whether

They will find a home again.  

 

You lose yourself in stacks of stones and tomes and poetry,

A clustered, flustered, flotsam-jetsam meld

Of stories bound together by the past;

Held in ship-shape place for

Longer than history itself.

 

You lose yourself under night’s weighty deep-dark cape,

Walking the fleeting distance from one bright-bite

Pinprick of light in the sky to another;

Wondering under what thundering sky

You yourself will join them.

 

You lose sight of yourself, you begin to notice, in the meaningless

Of hypocrisy, and the view of infinity from your bedroom window.

So while pre-processed thoughts and lacklustre words

Pour from the jaws of immobile, ignoble people,

 

You lose yourself again in the empty ticking of the clock,

And learn to love its simple sound.