Today's poem is by Jeanne Wagner

In Praise of Echo
       

Ovid made her into just another ditzy naiad condemned
to someone else's words,

but that's only repetition, not echo, not echo with its gift
of hoarding a voice for a few seconds

then playing it back so even the most playful hallooing
comes back as a hallowed sound.

My first day at school I raised my hand and asked if
I could go to the lavatory—

I'd rehearsed the word— but when I opened the door,
I found only hollowness

in that row of gaping basins, in the alien chill
of anonymous tile,

in the closeted stalls with their clanking locks. Alone
in a strange room,

I was afraid I might become invisible, like Echo.
I tried to scream but my voice

got lost in my throat. Poor Echo, in love with Narcissus,
she was repeating his words

in all the wrong places. My Irish grandmother told
me wells and caves are holy sites

where you can hear the sound of the spirits exhaling.
Science showed me

the rebounding path an echo takes, proof that even
a voice has touch.

What if we could find our way like bats or dolphins,
like swiftlets and whales,

like wolves who throw back their heads and howl to some
distant pack they'll possibly

never meet, yet they keep at it, ringing into the empty air
their one needful song?

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Copyright © 2023 Jeanne Wagner All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission