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Alan Harris reading

When Poems Are Still

by Alan Harris
It is calm of times now,
poems having disappeared like a mist.
Yesterday's nagging scintillations
that promised a tryst of wordings
now lie content below any saying, any art.

Quite free from poetry is almost any peace
until some brazen poet arrives
to stir up some alphabet soup--
but the very deepest calms, like a sea bottom,
lie mute beneath all chop of words and wind.

Today let there be rest from poems
and from other twistings of the mind,
for it is calm of times now, free enough
for wordless breath, and breath, and breath.





From the book Heartclips (1996)

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