she wonders why i choose poetry

but who with words like stones

can explain those strange reflections,

layered ghosts on glass,

of some run-down desert motel we pass,

its neon sign sputtering

against the flitting of locusts

rising before a sun

set by now miles from here,

replaced with the new moon

and two strangers who,

walking barefoot down the beach,

reach for each other and grab tight,

forgetting, as high tide masks

their traces, the questions

they've been longing

to ask?

For the "Short Poetry Contest."

Reviews

[Studio Dongo]

4th line evokes Prufrock for me. Not sure if it's supposed to, but I like it for doing that. And I like the buried, embedded cadences being washed over by the high tide and smoothed out as we reach the end of the (dare I say it?) OVERWHELMING question.

[Richard Man]

Great poem on many levels. I agree Eliot-like, the evocation of a history, of a past and a future washed away by the tide of now.

[Verser]

I love this poem for so many reasons. It is all one sentence, one thought, and one question. But a question with many parts, all related, as in one passage or story. And the question is a real one and a good one, as it plumbs why there is poetry and the poets who create it. Science cannot answer everything. And that is where poetry takes over.

Lovely poem, my friend.