New poem
Hungarian Dawn
The sun paints golden stripes across the green,
from the next valley sounds an early train,
Esther, ecstatic, reaches for the chimes,
my tablet plays the Cosi overture,
and Mozart cuts straight through the walls
between the solitary cells
where we are doomed to pass our days
and gently lays his fingers on my heart.
Poets should be fathers, Coleridge knew:
nothing captures that dawning freshness like
having to wake up, getting out of bed
and sharing those first morning moments with
someone who cannot yet speak,
who does not need to hear a word,
and just wants to be touched and held,
for you can hold a child and a pen.
The whole world moves to music, intervals
between men’s voices, shadows of the trees,
ideas and impressions, following
the natural progression of the scales;
a black cat wanders down the lane,
bay horses neigh and flick their tails,
a pheasant coughs, according to
the resonance, the music of the spheres.
Humanity’s dark inner caverns ring
from mighty grounds, and what we think or write
is just an echo of those normal modes,
the notes and stops of consonants and vowels
the pentatonic scale of breath,
and we communicate in time
in unison of each and all
the rhythm that makes two hearts beat as one.
And so I spend those precious first few hours
in writing poetry instead of work
– time out from get and spend – with much to do
and with a family needing to be fed;
the blue water in the pool
lays its perfect mosaic of tiles
of light, and with the closing notes,
where our path ends, a rose exalts the sun.