Poem of the Moment
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Every few weeks we pop a new poem up here to read or listen to. We only share poems that the poet has intentionally put in the public domain, or where we’ve gotten permission directly.
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A Prayer For The Dead
In the Italian village where I live now, we pass through desolate places, wearing our masks like bandits, not speaking to our neighbors, doing great silent mourning. Church bells rang this morning as I was up on a ladder trimming the grapevines, and I paused on the thousand-year-old wall and felt the sun on my neck and then went on trimming and tossing dead stalks of vine wood onto a pile.
At night, unable to sleep, I arose from bed and went out to the garden under the moonlight and stood near the wall where the dead vine wood was strewn and felt the silence of the village, everyone sleeping, alone or together but inside, behind the old stone walls of the town.
A great wave of dying washes over our world. We sense it in the night, the spirits going up like smoke, the well-ordered caskets in cathedrals and in trenches, the unknown dead, the cherished dead, the friends and family of the dead, the spiderweb of consequence catching on our clothing as it passes over us and continues on to elsewhere, another land, another hand, another host.
~ Cary Tennis