Why hast thou forsaken me, Erratum, muse of the blog post?
But seriously, if I can steal a line for my blog post title, why not steal the whole poem as my blog post? This one comes by way of our November Writer's Buzz, Help is On the Way! The show, a collaborative effort held on the daring date of Friday the 13th, featured short, original compositions on piano by Lighthouse member and career pianist Susan Cable (she studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg! Mike Henry learned this, pronouncing it experimentally--for the first time--as emcee in front of 80-plus at 910 Arts), and twenty-some new, also-short poems by Lighthouse instructor John Brehm.
One of many highlights for me (about which more will be posted later) was John Brehm reading this poem:
| The Poems I Have Not Written | ||
| by John Brehm | ||
I’m so wildly unprolific, the poems I have not written would reach from here to the California coast if you laid them end to end. And if you stacked them up, the poems I have not written would sway like a silent Tower of Babel, saying nothing and everything in a thousand different tongues. So moving, so filled with and emptied of suffering, so steeped in the music of a voice speechless before the truth, the poems I have not written would break the hearts of every woman who’s ever left me, make them eye their husbands with a sharp contempt and hate themselves for turning their backs on the very source of beauty. The poems I have not written would compel all other poets to ask of God: "Why do you let me live? I am worthless. please strike me dead at once, destroy my works and cleanse the earth of all my ghastly imperfections." Trees would bow their heads before the poems I have not written. "Take me," they would say, "and turn me into your pages so that I might live forever as the ground from which your words arise." The wind itself, about which I might have written so eloquently, praising its slick and intersecting rivers of air, its stately calms and furious interrogations, its flutelike lingerings and passionate reproofs, would divert its course to sweep down and then pass over the poems I have not written, and the life I have not lived, the life I’ve failed even to imagine, which they so perfectly describe. |
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