How many doors open, how many close
while your eye skims this “moment’s monument”?
Holed up in a slum lord’s apartment house,
an old man dies, alone, irrelevant.
Another life is pincered out of the womb,
from tropic sleep into our arctic day.
In a deluxe hotel’s Edwardian room
a widow fiercely hugs a rose bouquet
sent by a charmer half her age, with card
warbling silk words that curtain his design.
In the Sahara of a hospital ward
a bed explodes with pain like a land mine.
And meanwhile the galaxy, that spiral ear
carrying us through darkness, does not hear.
Copyright © 2009 by Alfred Dorn. All rights reserved.From Voice From Rooms, Somers Rocks Press.Reprinted by Verse Weekly with permission.
