The News Reached the Poet
WHEN i write of sleeping/lived Christ, i see him at midnight
in a crucified way, love wrought-out with grace:
the blood on the walls, the lusty grief,
the artist lying on freezing pavement,
like a drunk in an apartment.
Always?for whom in whom: for the Lord.
Over it, dreams are made, then screams are made,
grief, pain, loss, longing, fierce promises of life; a skull.
i try to create a shield, clinging to the truth of prose,
where every word can express with precision an unreachable.
For how can i say?
THiEF!
A sharp wit?that haunts me, rattles the prophet.
i should write poetry. At first, i thought that a rhyme
might distract my readers.
Then i thought it might frighten them. This thinning armor
is the price of the art of memory:
i go to my poems now like refugees crossing a flooded
river.
What is the music of the poet?
Nothing, a voice, the absence of a voice, as i write, the sound
of a key in an empty door, the charmed silence of an oasis.
Even this room where i try to be alone, tortured, longing to die,
might fade away into a memory, and this empty room with my dead dead body.
My childhood was warm, it was a long summer. i stayed indoors for weeks. Until the evening sky weeps, a smell that is sad and sticky, my brain yelling my mother's name:
Hoelun!
Hoelun!
Father crosses to the bank of the river --i drown, he swims to the other side.
i leave this world with the stench of paraquat.
it kills all my green and the flowers die.
:: 11.01.2022 ::
Copyright © Ernest Robles | Year Posted 2022
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