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by Peter Fernbach Every word you read is a drunken sailor Out to sea, turned around in a tempest Compass blown under the pressure Of competing Poles. Language is a map For a field that shifts under our feet Leaving us refugees and castaways. But there is for each one of us, beyond storm and suffering A Beatrice, Penelope or Salvation: And what better name to slap on deliverance Than Home (pronounced sometimes ohm)? Don't we each feel - somewhere beneath the skin And blood and bone of our daily disaster Evasion - a compass more true, more steady More real than the fluttering babble we get from the one on deck? Poems are the self carving a way through The currents that threaten to capsize our thin rafts; Poems are the bolstering of the leaky boards That keep us from returning to inert matter; Poems reclaim the peace of Home In the bedlam of survival and psychobabble. And although we've been offshore for innumerable days There is reason for what can seem empty words - hope, faith. The present looks to the past as a deep ocean of possibles And to the future - blustery eyes in the wind - As an unpredictable enlightenment. The future Can't be prefigured in the real or now Because life itself writes the way. Copyright 2011. All rights reserved.
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