Today's poem is by Sheila Black

Aubade for Longing
       

There are still songs to be sung on the other
side of the human.

Even as paradise turns to winter,
the whales

disappear with their soundings, absence stitches
the caverns of sea.

Infinitesimal spaces in my brain grow and split—
sieve of shadowbox, saint's relic,

plane tree, bread-and-butter. A car
careens a curve, a radio in a distant room,

a song about what stops.

And what are you but this flicker inside me
for which I invent fingers and

elbows, a head of hair,

flux of light in a city I have not visited
in years,

pavement

that bears our fleeting mark,
posters peeling and you, you, you,

a silence that swoops through,
arguing endlessly against the notion

of silence.

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Copyright © 2024 Sheila Black All rights reserved
from West Trade Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission