Sketch for A.G.

August 12, 2016
poem

There was only the moment
and the mourning –
sheer black veils
and the silence that pricks
moving out of the stage light
and into black
merging into black
merging into black.

Silence is not enough,
he said, narrating,
and clapped
like the thunder that spoke
in the first wash of
wet noise
in the first light
of an August morning –
It is the thunder that endures,
the primordial Donner
that blinds more than the Blitz.

There were mumblings
in the lobby that night,
low utterances of waste
and the thin flick of
spent tickets in the hands
of those who failed to speak.