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Venetian Magicians / Prayer
Note to readers These poems are begun by an inspired first line or two, and during this particular development from poem to po…
Who I’ve become after all my
adventures on land
is a seventy-one year-old man who
fasts from dawn to sundown
sailing off across the day
with a two-legged goat and a
flying fish searching for the
source of all this daylight
avoiding the usual ports of call
in favor of sleepy villages where
everyone knows everyone’s name and
night rolls its huge velvet
blanket over the rooftops of the
satisfied and satisfactory villagers
If I meet you once I’ll remember your
face forever
but your name might roll back into the
Babylonian directory of ghostly mortals
And if you see me in one place you’ll maybe
see me in another as
likely as a face appearing from
inside an iceberg
or a song audible in a
light spring rainfall
This is all coming right out of nowhere
and like all of us goes right
back where it came from
though at the end of the day when
plates are filled with rainbow
meats and Technicolor juices
and the tattooed sails are
mended for tomorrow and the
goat hobbles onto evening pastures
and the flying fish finally finds a
plot of water to plop in
you’ll see celebration in my eyes
of all these seventy-one years
come to fruition
and “God be praised!” on my lips
even if cracked by the many minor
hardships endured
8/20/11 20 Ramadan (from Ramadan is Burnished Sunlight)
Categories: Poems, Ramadan / 'Eid, Fasting