Every day as I strain
Through the throngs
Commuters to work:
Coughing, reading
Averting, shifty eyes,
I wonder,
Are their smiles
Ever given or received?
Not for me
But for someone?
Arriving silently,
I walk through
Library catacombs
Dust thick in my nostrils,
Leaf-meal of crumbling pages
Scattered on stack floors.
Hand strains for top shelves
Back bends for bottom ones.
Authors know me,
They nod graciously
When I find them,
Aright their wronged placement,
Mending their frayed bindings,
Gently pressing through
Delicate pages.
I ask the words,
Hundreds of years
Since fresh penned,
Scan the pictures,
More alien than Xanadu.
Who were you
That winced bespectacled
By candlelight?
Poured out your heart,
To parchment or wood pulp.
Did not trust others
For inmost thoughts,
Not wife, nor husband, nor friends.
Now we gather you
Through the ages,
Build new wings, branches,
Mausoleums of reflection,
The writer's keyhole
Mirror of the world seen
Only within himself.
So, I push my cart
Up and down the ramp,
Gathering philosophies,
Frustrations, opinions,
Amusements,
Rainbow emotions.
Blackened hands
On the ancient tomes,
Sneezing away centuries.
They prod me onward
Turn inside,
I tuck them in,
As I do my own soul
With intangible pages.
Enumerable islands
Born, dying, feeble
Amongst the crowd,
Waiting to be loved.
As so often happens, a reader's propensity for seeking out that special camaraderie with books (a relationship far too few pursue)he or she finds, as you have here, that there is a special connection waiting to be read, pondered, and loved. Such rewards remain unique to the oft times slandered book worm. (Although, I read recently that book readers on NY's subway system had been voted sexiest riders.) Go figure.
Danae, you must change the title to "Waiting to be loved." It is such an appropriate finish to your superbly penned poem. I am laughing, not in amusement, but in resignation. You have left little more to be said. Well, maybe not.
And so we are . . . Even the poets living . . . We scream inside our poetry . . . Is anybody listening? . . . Does anyone care? . . . I guess in the long run it really matters not . . . We write . . . We cry and laugh at ourselves . . . But we do write . . . That is a natural fact . . . We can do nothing less.
Selected poems from previous & forthcoming collections together with Q&R apps on each page to enable audio rendition simultaneously with the written text
Questions, unquestioned discoveries, and answers in parable and rhyme…. This collection records a journey starting with a 1960s retrospective and the first man on the moon, moving to a new millennium welcomed in with a terrorist spin, family crises,
The songs and art in this book are about our collective emergence after the pandemic and trauma of the last few years - comprised of 5 collections: World as Refuge, Where We Live, In Our Hands, Rhythms of Change and What We See & Sow.
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