Tears - Elizabeth Carothers Herron

[Larry Robinson]

Tears  
 
                Kathmandu April 2015
 
The clear round vase on the table
filled with water holds the world
upside down and magnified, reflecting
the chair-back, the shimmering birch
beyond the window. Deeper
 
into the woods, shadows
shield the mystery of what sleeps there
having roamed the night as we
turned toward and away and toward
and dreamed our separate dreams,
while the Kathmandu restaurant
 
whose narrow stone steps I climbed
tumbled into a world turned 
upside down in a street no longer recognizable, 
turned out of itself the way mayhem 
casts out meaning –
 
this pot where the cook melted ghee
beside the splintered back
of a patron’s chair, this blue scarf 
fluttering from the rubble as prayer flags 
fluttered above the entrance. The stairs
 
speak to each other, mystified
by their new arrangement – the first step
grating against the eighth, the ninth
under the fourth, the third beside the fifth.
If this were music, their confusion might
convey the longing for harmony 
lost inside the dissonance of chaos,
the moans and cries of the mortal world
with its icy rivers turned to salt.
 
	- Elizabeth Carothers Herron
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/poetrylovers/attachments/20150429/cf39d465/attachment.html>