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Marsha Singh Poem
What a burning, broken universe—
incalculable, devastating,
things we can't imagine.
We attach names familiar to us
Titan, Europa, Calypso
but they are still mighty and immeasurable, terrifying—
but don't think of all that.
It's too big.
It's too sad.
Think of this:
It's sublime and impossible that we even exist
with our
soft flesh and our wet eyes,
our music, our sins,
our jealous lovers,
our moments of bliss,
and love— god, love…
more immeasurable
more incalculable
than the universe,
than whatever it is
that the universe wonders about.
Our smallness shouldn't humble us.
We are tiny demigods
watching the universe expand
from our lawn chairs
while we eat ripe peaches
with sticky hands and smiling mouths.
Copyright © Marsha Singh | Year Posted 2010
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Marsha Singh Poem
I swore I would not write a poem for my father,
who hated poetry
and poets
and most things,
as though it would dishonor him—
his bookish daughter
who cried too easily;
who sat silently through dinner;
who slipped quietly from rooms
as he entered,
still thinking she was better than him.
Fifteen years later,
I find myself in Boston,
rattling through cool tunnels
below the city of my birth.
I think I see him—
younger than he could have ever been;
but still, the white t-shirt,
the thin mouth,
the blue eyes that I did not inherit—
and what disturbs me the most
is not that I have just seen my dead father
step out of a train into
the cool white, the great big;
it's that my first thought was
I hope he doesn't see me.
So I am trying to love him,
and I am writing a poem for my father
who smelled like
cigarettes
and soap
and sawdust
and raised five girls on a quarryman's pay,
and I am crying,
but it feels different this time.
Copyright © Marsha Singh | Year Posted 2010
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Details |
Marsha Singh Poem
The wrong thing
seduces the heart
into a quiet corner
and the right thing
kills it.
Copyright © Marsha Singh | Year Posted 2010
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