In The Round

This stage is a holy place

full of all of the colors of human existence

full of now and everynow.

It exists in the present or not at all

in every moment in history.

 

The story is entwined passionately

with love that is not love, pain that is not pain,

coincidence that overcomes every plan.

All life's grand contradictions are played out here,

fear and favor on full display before a jury of her peers.

 

It does not end happily, or ever after

but waits

                   suspended

 

Alive with possibility

that the people will return

to fill their rows, take their places

and try again to get it right.

 

8-8-2022

 

See

Times like these,

Artists’ eyes are born.

Eyes that ask

And sometimes see.

 

Eyes that live

In that ironic, uncomfortable crevice

Between joy and cynicism,

That simply say what others will not.

 

05-11-2020

Art Night

Broken hearts and misfits

prone to delusion and distraction we

walk the world

with tunes in our heads,

colors in our eyes connecting

dots in mostly

irreverent ways mad,

we are, every one.

Not quite part of

your sane little world.

We find each other in coffee shops,

church basements, impromptu meetings

art markets, open mics,

circles made to grow larger

we come as singers and players

writers and tellers

seekers and loners.

Loners, all

Until we find each other

strange and dented

then,

poem by poem

song by song

we make

the invisible, visible

the foolish, brave 
the world, more human.

© 2016 Donna Jo Wallace 
shared with Poets United / Poetry Pantry #285

Page

What suicide is this, to set the pen down,

to walk away from the page at all.

What hubris to think that in escaping,

the page would not follow,

dog your steps, and infect your mind.

Your empty page grows, mortal,

vacant and white,

pursuing you like the tomb you thought to escape.

Numb and smiling,

you have given in to bland busyness

while you tried, vainly,

to hold the past at bay,

the present in limbo.

What do you fear what Do you fear

A critic has been born in you

who cuts at your page with scissors

like a child run amok,

Your mind in fragments across time.

Her power grows while you thought to ignore her.

She has had her say and thinks she can win.

And yet, patient page has waited after all.

She has not accused you as you had thought.

But wise and implacable, has waited

For you to do that, entirely, yourself.

©2015 Donna Jo Wallace.
Note: Shared with Poets United / Poetry Pantry

First Flight

I hold the words gently in my mind,

round, expectant, warm

like one small bird in my hand,

eager and alive, awaiting its first flight.

I lay them on the page and discover

they are only flat, lifeless shadows

looking up, mocking me.

In desperation I take paste and scissors to them,

reconstruct them one by one,

I jumble them together and watch them land

until they would do my bidding.

I have only the success I would have had

if I pasted that small warm bird together

from bone and feather, then willed it to fly.

©2007 Donna Jo Wallace.

Speak

I, too, have the conceit to speak,

and break into your sacred silence

I, too, must hear my voice

to know I exist

I imagine that the workings of my mind

Must be fascinating to you

You, who I do not know

And will not know

Sincerely and well

Because of the noise between us

©2011 Donna Jo Wallace.

Coffee House

Cups fill to the brim with music

rich and warm, poems
brown and frothy

Guitars burst with pages from life, real and hard

Masked thinly by tune and rhythm.

We are neighbors who agree to be strangers,

To seek kind anonymity for

memories too harsh to bear

dreams too fragile to speak aloud.

Performer or audience, to watch or to do

Here, it’s all the same.

To slow down

for an evening separate from a frenzied world

We take a breath of another life.

We take away bits of each other;

See in others bits of ourselves.

We have stolen a moment of sacred sharing

Among strangers who are really neighbors.

©2011 Donna Jo Wallace.