My poems should be more contemporary. It means
Longer lines, less rhymes, less stress on I and me.
It entails relating events with finesse and subtlety,
And spending far less verbiage
on abstractions such as feelings.
The everyday, the obvious
will be for the first time really seen:
Where and how the hours
pass is what we should be pondering.
I go for it with a report
on the sleep of Andy and Rory:
One consistently grinding
his teeth, the other lightly snoring.
Both blonde boys not quite
fat but certainly not lean,
An extra candy bar toward
chunkiness if anything,
Rory in kindergarten, his
brother just fourteen.
I bite the tongue that says
I should be adding
That in their waking, as
in their sleep, they should always be this free
Of anything hurtful, or
ugly, or mean.
Because I am startled to
note that both boys' lashes are so long that as they dream,
Shadows cast by the lashes
on their cheeks are all of the seams
Visible on faces that, I
realize now, define divinity.
So that suddenly this "normalcy,"
(two boys asleep)
Has been justly identified
to be, in reality, majesty.
As mother and poet I submit
that, while the contemporary
Mode may be the course of
choice, for this poem it was necessary
To employ device and language
appropriately lofty,
In order to impart the truth
that I was given to see,
With clarity spirited to
my eyes by sleeping boys epiphanously.
(Or was it love that filled
my eyes as I watched my babies sleep?)
These visions: the somnolent
Andy, the sleeping Rory,
Are the visions that witnessed
that I stood in the presence of glory.
© 1997-2002 barbara bales
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