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Poetry

Last night I climbed once more
the narrow ladder
of my poems.

I took my fine pen
and turned paper
into ash.

What were you
turned into?
What did you become,

after?

Once you said
that to write a poem
is to touch the unseen.

If I have touched the unseen,
it has not been in my poems,
in their labored breaths

and gesticulations.
Perhaps I touched it reaching
with gloved and gentle hand

for the bat trapped
in the flue, or when
the doe,

surprised in the field’s raw stubble,
bowed her head to me
and did not run.

Perhaps to suffer kindness
is to touch the unseen.
Last night I listened
hard into the dark.
I was waiting
for a poem to you.

That listening
was my kindness.

There is much
that was unseen.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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