I asked her, “How’s things?” Or maybe it was “How are you?” Or maybe “How’s it going?” And when the answer came “Fine” or “It’s okay,” the tone belied the words. Everything was not okay, and this person, at this time, needed to be heard. Needed someone to listen, and this someone was, because of time and circumstance, me.
It was a story of deceit and anger, of people hurting others, of anguish. I squashed my impulse to rush in with “What can I do?” and determined that, for now, listening was best. Just, for the moment, being truly present was all I was being asked to do. Sitting quietly, listening, was enough. Which got me to thinking.
A million years ago (well, a decade or two in the past) I often felt compelled to commit Poetry. Just for me, see? Very little to share here, except, perhaps, for a few forays into Occasional Poems—poems for someone’s birthday or some such. Whichever, wherever, those and other private poems came from a place of listening, which evolved into the urgent need to share what I had heard through words written and tangible. The need to commit Poetry, for me, dictates a crunching up of words, a need to ask myself what I am listening to, or just have listened to, or have listened to enough that the thoughts demand attention. A while ago I shared my poetic thoughts on the Seven Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins. Today it’s … Overhead:
Overhead
What is that.
What are those words.
What are the bars of sounds
The rain writes overhead.
On the roof. On each leaf.
Those steel tattoos are urgent
Numbers letters words I should
Unscramble.
All these rattling sheets of sound
Define the drops into
Essential cavalcades:
Awake, you fool! or
Arms! To Arms! or
Mount the barricades at once!
For justice sake!
For mercy cries!
But suddenly it’s not, it’s something else.
It’s slippers, old men’s slippers
Soft sliding along the marble
Of a pale green room where light
Refracted looms
Around their wispy
Frail hair and white predominates.