(No Title Yet)

Some days

I lean hard,

watching for insight

to poke its green nose

up through the loam,

prepared to attend it

with faith until harvest.

Some days

my head pops like

mushrooms from a lawn

after a good rain,

ideas breaking from

the leafy treetops,

a black flock bolting

and gone into the distance

before I can accommodate,

or give a name

to even one of them.

I should speak of

the thought I had

about my young son's

first attempt at shaving.

Or explain to my

eleven year old daughter

about how

heartache comes with heartbeat.

Or her teenage sister about

how some things must

come before others.

I might write a word or two

for my mother, to thank her

for bearing down when asked,

and squeezing me

helpless and hollering

into the fuzzy light

of my first afternoon.

To my father, gratitude

for leaving some lumps in

the smooth of my mashed potatoes.

I would like to make a

grand but subtle statement

on behalf of the fifteen thousand

dead in the rubble of Istanbul,

and the ink from this very pen

which stained my favorite shirt.

I want to inform all

the people who run

in expensive sneakers,

how hard it can be to be

a barefooted hunter of

beautiful birds, who

in stuffing their dead carcasses,

believes they will live forever.

And I will hope

that my living will be directed

by my sense of wonder, by

a feeling that existence

is a prayer which

delivers your dreams.

And never write a line

in pain or about pain or

how it can feel to

waken in the morning alone.

Too many words have been

written about those things,

many of them by me, and

I am convinced this very day,

listening to crickets

proclaim a coming rain,

that enough

is enough

already.

Daniel Thomas Moran is the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent having been published by Canio's Editions of Sag Harbor, New York in 1999. He is Literary Correspondent to Long Island Public Radio and an Executive Trustee to The Walt Whitman Birthplace Association. He recently returned from a second reading tour of Ireland. His fifth collection, The Queen of Willow Pond, is expected in 2001.

Copyright National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Journal Summer 2001
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