The Heart’s Cadence

The beloved voice of poetry,
its rhythm, was slain
by the surrealist prose,
the way love was murdered by domestic life.
Flame trees and deserts,
like sorrow-drenched narratives—
dream-waves come to brush against the truth,
winds play in bamboo groves,
fathers of children and houses,
ancestral non-residences.
This place once teemed with people,
this land unfit for dwelling.
 
Love had died one day
in the tug-of-war of economy;
many feelings had turned irrelevant.
To understand this world through money—
love without value,
the burden of the worthless.
 
Like life itself, poetry has no
inherent meaning.
A singular, complete meaning
is almost impossible to create.
It must find a mind
where meaningless futility still nests,
even now—
astonished, amazed—
rhythm, meaning, measure, verse,
full moons
were lost long ago,
like sorrow-drenched narratives
in surreal worlds.
 
Is there a land of the mind? Just enough—
where poems dwell
in their own glory,
in regal arrangements,
and even now
they create meaning
with the toil of waves and sand—
life’s most precious preparation,
the grandest of festivals:
a piece of burnt bread
and all five senses—let them remain.
 
May the beloved voice of poetry
find a place, with due grace,
in the most uninhabitable building,
where poems still live,
where rhythm is understood,
where opposing forms and perceptions,
buoyant in a thoughtless world,
bring thought—
discipline of the mind, movement, art, feeling—
the sixth sense awakening—
above all,
not machine, but human nature