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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Poem for Mandolin

Can’t you see I am helpless?
Everything bangs into corners.
The road turns and curls
and gets lost in the bushes.
How hopeless you make me feel!
Like a suitor that can’t find words.
A stranger wanting to be introduced,
a road needing travelers,
riverbed without water,
stadium without crowds.

If you were a song
I would strike one key on the piano
and weep.
A song looking for itself,
blaming me for my barrenness.
I hear its voice in the distance.
I am drowning, it calls.
The song poem in my heart,
an urchin tree,
branches shorn of their leaves.
I am lost, I reply.

I am fading into myself.
My wings are broken.
Where do all the unwritten poems stay?
Go too?
Are they children
waiting for the door to be opened?
Do they look through the window
on a rainy day?

Tell them I’m sorry.
I feel a shout inside me,
the song of a mandolin,
a poem rising from the mud,
the smell of the earth,
lips of a woman in love.

Published inIndex of all Poems