Your sparrow in memory dives to snap up a gleaming fly. Can you not face it? Your sparrow is dead: undone in dirt by crawly things, sipped up by a twisted root. You do not smell the rot in your heart: you never had shovels for hands.
Published as lyrics for Matthew S. Rosin’s Singing Is Contagious EP, 2020.
Your vast imagined edifice is but air: a balloon, pricked. You have always been bleeding. Could you know your wound? Smile kindly upon it? Begin again?
Published as lyrics for Matthew S. Rosin’s Singing Is Contagious EP, 2020.
You thought you knew it all, so you clung to the name. You thought you knew it all, so you clung to the name. You thought you knew it all, so you clung to the name. Now you’re trapped in your word cage. Are you listening for the sounds that don’t fit your scheme? Are you listening for the pleas that undercut your dream? You thought you knew it all, so you clung to the name. Now you’re locked away in your word cage. When a syllable varies, do you cut it away? Do you take hold of the tongue and beat it into place? You thought you knew it all, so you clung to the name. Now your children are dying in your word cage.
Published as lyrics for Matthew S. Rosin’s Singing Is Contagious EP, 2020.
Have you looked into that face? That face looks into you. She knows her torch, a burden, but keeps her vigil, loyal despite your habits, your forgetting. Your turn will come. Her prayer will be your lungs.
First published on www.matthewsrosin.com, Facebook, and Twitter, July 4, 2018.
Today is Poem In Your Pocket Day, part of National Poetry Month!
If you don’t have a poem handy for your pocket, here’s one that I wrote: a poem about poems kept safe in pockets, called “Solidarity.”
Read it here. (You can hear a song version, too.)