Into Your Harried Night I Break In Silence
The cicadas beat their metallic wings to compensate
the vehicles lying asleep in the oil-black road
without a trifle of noise - away with the moon
in a peripatetic espionage for the myriad
of faults swimming through the abysmal horizon
and here, in the glacial nooks of darkness, I trample
to a wistful invitation - to pain and its bride
unveiled from the lustrous gilt and the castigations
unraveled from the knotted tapestry its frangible
and haplessly finagling heart - still and alone tonight
This silence sojourned to listen to you
as your world subsides with all the aeons
slithering into me with an impertinent pang
and I break for you, like a lifeless eye upfront
a motionless gloaming succumbing to its demise
And to break for you - your tides beating the shore
and the praying boulders on its shoulder, is all I can do
after ousting my sparrow-breaths on your mornings
or my tacit poems docked on your cigarette smoke,
I do not intend to come back like a smothering whiff
in the midst of your sudden toppling and heaving
I break upon you, like a fist hurled at the sky
though I would never shatter the fastidious heavens
and though your hills loomed with secret legends,
but in my slivering, asunder from yours, I fold
like a sibilant knife dreading the patina of blood
I hope for your vitriol to whet itself as it rolled
upon the seething lions under the flames
What a farcical charade has this life become
that I can only exhibit the shadows of our dusk
and its acquiescent pedagogy, for tonight, you break
like how my world of stones and graves began
The art of war is etched in your palms and maps
Come back to your open window and lighted lamp
when the night hearkens your lacerating cries
stronger than the infernal demise that you will break
in the larceny of sounds in this transatlantic night
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
