I am listening!
Just as you said, it's my task
to listen for you
in the summer's hum,
in the hot electric blue
of this August day,
I am listening.
You said you would circle me,
touch my sore eyes, breathe
your cool across me
and change this day just like that.
So I'm listening
because you've become
my call, my one great task, gold
like daylight and you
are pure notes, like rain.
August 25, 2010 5:02 PM
Modified October 14, 2013
I almost always find your poetry moving. Yet often I feel that because it is so deeply personal to you, I may not tread where any footfall would mar something bordering on the sacred.
ReplyDeleteThat is kind of you Tom. However, I would add to your vision that I have worked lifelong to detach from my entanglements. One of the things I do in this way is pull from the queue. I still have over three hundred unpublished poems waiting in line and this is one of them. It was poorly finished back in 2010, though I may not have thought so then. So I did some work last night before setting it up to publish this morning. By now it is written in first person but is really a story, someone's story like my story or once was my story. I have as much idea as you at this point just precisely what I was thinking of when I wrote. In this way the poem might have once been personal but is not now. I am a publishing writer and that is different from a private journalist.
DeleteIt is a great compliment that you see my poems as personal expressions. It is my intent to be honest and frank.