PrinceMyshkin
07-16-2008, 10:17 PM
One
He was not the wild singer
we took him for, but a man
age and longing
drove half-mad.
The sweet black letters
of his trade
came cranky
sometimes to the page
until he learned,
with a boy's young rage,
that an old man's grief
is to be made a sage.
Two
--Someone who shifted syllables
around a page, practising
the rhymester's trade.
A simple game for a man to play.
While the world around him
traded more difficult things:
murder for love and truth
for deceit.
The world could be changed
(and remain the same)
but not by syllables
upon a page.
The worst men, in its stolid way,
the world to raging madness tames.
The best men
play the simplest games.
Three
Although he had the purest diction
he was just a man, mortal,
his voice
produced in the voice-box of the mind
or heart, trying to find
words to speak against the dark
of Ireland's trouble and the bleat
and roar of trouble in the blood,
rehearsing the common flood
that God might call on him
to speak about, or some
familiar stranger, met by the side
of the road, who would ask
of him, and of you:
What of the night? What of
the night?
J. Newman Sudden Proclamations copyright 1992
He was not the wild singer
we took him for, but a man
age and longing
drove half-mad.
The sweet black letters
of his trade
came cranky
sometimes to the page
until he learned,
with a boy's young rage,
that an old man's grief
is to be made a sage.
Two
--Someone who shifted syllables
around a page, practising
the rhymester's trade.
A simple game for a man to play.
While the world around him
traded more difficult things:
murder for love and truth
for deceit.
The world could be changed
(and remain the same)
but not by syllables
upon a page.
The worst men, in its stolid way,
the world to raging madness tames.
The best men
play the simplest games.
Three
Although he had the purest diction
he was just a man, mortal,
his voice
produced in the voice-box of the mind
or heart, trying to find
words to speak against the dark
of Ireland's trouble and the bleat
and roar of trouble in the blood,
rehearsing the common flood
that God might call on him
to speak about, or some
familiar stranger, met by the side
of the road, who would ask
of him, and of you:
What of the night? What of
the night?
J. Newman Sudden Proclamations copyright 1992