Unspoken Word
May 10, 2022
MY HEART OPENS

My heart opens
like my eyes,
involuntarily,
like a child upon waking,
amazed
with not a single plan for the day
and though it blinks from time to time,
still it sees
and though it cannot speak,
it beats,
a late night drummer
alone in his room,
the entire universe his gig.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:31 AM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2022
The Music at Death's Threshold

This just in from my wonderful friend, Robert Michael Esformes:

Perhaps we arrive here after stately
cadences resolve themselves in final absolution;
or the scales with their teasing inflections
fall from our eyes and allow the final flatline fermata.

Perhaps it's been a majestic and complex
Beethovian coda preparing the dying for departure;
or a closing arpeggio like a light trickle of rain;
or the hushed moments as an adagio fades into stillness.

May be you hear a dissonant cluster of
estranged tones, like relatives hovering at
bedside, bickering as the dying one gives
back to the waiting angel its first inspiration.

May be it's a smoky mode that slowly folds
back into the lifetime's gift of breath,
releasing the measure of a man, a woman--
time and key signatures no longer relevant.

Or the moment at concerto's conclusion,
the closing chords resounding, the sound
extending and rising... that you, the oboe soloist,
vanish with the fading echoes of the orchestral finale?

Impossible innuendos of the final silence -- and
you must enter in with the whole note of your being
tuned precisely for this occasion: your body an offering,
a composite now scattering, a time for decomposition.

The cadaver of a score lies quietly,
left behind on the stately podium.
The touch of an allegretto breeze
rustles the curtains. Now stillness.

The conductor waves her bright baton as
we find our place on limitless ledger lines.
The upbeat crests, and the descending hand
explodes into a symphony for the new world.

Robert Michael Esformes
May 2022

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

May 02, 2022
THERE IS A MOMENT

There is a moment
and that moment is now,
a single drop of water on a spider web,
a warrior sharpening his sword,
your child,
whose first word
is just about to be pronounced,
the moment when
everything stops
and nothing needs to be
started again,
your first kiss,
the toothless smile of a beggar,
rain,
the glorious moment when you let it all go,
all that trying
all those promises made too late.
What remains is
everything and nothing,
the place where the path
begins and ends,
your next breath
the only proof you need
that God exists.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)

“I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.”
— John Cage

Welcome to my new blog — brief ruminations on what it is that moves me (and maybe YOU, too). If any of my poems inspire you, please forward them to friends. Good muse travels fast. Or could, with your help.

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