How can I sing when I must weep?
How can I leap when I must limp?
How can I swagger on a stage
who cannot bear to turn a page?
Oh you can sing and make us weep;
you can leap with lines of fire;
and swagger on the creaking stage
today, forget tomorrow's page.
How can I laugh who've lost the joke?
How can I twirl in vertigo?
How can I dance upon the stage
who've stiffened up with age?
The joke's a thread a kitten found.
Just let the world be lights and blur.
Bones may shuffle on a stage
suggestive elegance of age.
How can I bear the orphan sea,
the vanishing of used-to-be?
A desert leads off from the stage.
Cannot intone another page.
The sea it is an Orphic lyre
wherein is everything entire.
This theater's in the round, off stage
agog for singing of the page.
YOU ARE READING
The Singing Season
PoetryThe Singing Season. That's the spring-time. You'll also like other MajorSeventh poetry collections - and there are so many to choose from.
