While We Talk | The Cat Sprang Up (two poems)

 

 

 

While We Talk

 

That is merely a trial taking place in the next room

Making the dogs bark

Their keening furnishes a kind of proof

All legitimate things must be tested three times

Water rises

While we talk of instability

I shan’t interrupt myself again…but you’ll note

Pathetic cries replace the calls for help

 

You see that to isolate one from another

Thwarts communication

I mean, of course, in the human population

 

 

 

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The Cat Sprang Up

 

Since largely we are not little match girls

And because the habit of sneaking asks of us

That any wisp of fellow-feeling

Be snuffed and whisked aside in the cup and ball game

The atom shot from the huddled mass to huddle in a doorway

would gather kindling, rather, to assemble a torch

She waves it at the power his position affords

The high horse proven an untenable seat

First, your city hall she says

Jail me for the night and feed me gruel

You’d be surprised

 

He feels unqualified to take advice

Are they like that, there at the periphery of sight?

Here she is using imagery of violence

All workings of the human mind

Foreign to him, since he handed his own

To a coterie of nibbling mice

 

 

 

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Uncollected Poems

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2017, Stephanie Foster)