Elegies for the Night (2002)
for W
1
You might palm a small token, damp and misshapen as the words
you expel, never admitting the dark truth.
Or the plundered life, neither black nor white, invisible yet whole.
Someone prays, yet all around silence reigns and the snow melts.
Possibilities cleansed in the light of misplaced certainty.
2
The charred wind’s fruit bears little resemblance to its predecessor.
And later, within the garden’s stones, what remains
but an acrid taste on the tongues of the speechless?
And if the bones have dispersed where might their thoughts reside?
The wind takes nothing it does not want.
The wind wants nothing.
Nothing remains.
I am afraid, she said. Please tell me.
3
Though the moon returns in its diminished
state, I shall not listen. Words
turn back and eat
themselves, exposing intent
behind form, consonants beneath
vowels lying in wait. Abandonment.
And further senseless
debates: gain from loss, shock and awe,
the incessant demand for others to do
not what you would do but what you would have them do.
I claim no insight,
but even the light you reveal burns unclean.
4
Despair and its siblings fall to mind.
Scarcities: clean water, air, the simplest meal
when ashes swirl and fingers burn long after
the rain. My son, my son,
and other cries lost in the sand.
If he listened what sounds could he bear,
what sights, which odors? I tremble and lie still.
* * *
“Elegies for the Night” first appeared in Boston Poetry Magazine in April 2014.
O at the Edges 
“the incessant demand for others to do not what you would do but what you would have them do.” Oh…😔😔😔
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It is a common thing among the privileged…
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if only more people were thinking these thoughts 17 years ago…
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Many were, but their voices didn’t count. Truth didn’t matter.
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The truth is the only thing that does matter but millions of people shouting the truth can’t stop the system. We have to turn off the faucet and make the system thirst. Rifles can’t be loaded without willing taxpayers. Imagine if those millions of people who were yelling at the president 17 years ago had followed Thoreau and refused to be complicit.
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Perhaps we’ll have that chance in the near future.
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the answer is still blowing in the wind…(K)
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Let’s hope it gets tangled in a fence!
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or caught in a butterfly net
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That would be appropriate.
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Oh what atrocities we reek on the world! Think of all the billions that could have been used to build rather than destroy!
I thought this was a great line: And if the bones have dispersed where might their thoughts reside?
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If only we would build! It’s odd that so many people are afraid that someone will get something they don’t have (or even want). So we have our current system, which pits people of limited circumstances against each other.
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Yes, and then sends the same group to fight! Getting rid of the pawns of society!!??
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It’s devastating.
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Love this expression: Possibilities cleansed in the light of misplaced certainty
Seems a universal truth … and this poem points to many a misplaced certainty past … oh, for clarity moving forward!
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We live in a time of misplaced certainties!
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