Power

If poetry were blocks of stone

And songs were solid ice,

I could cover up the desert

And engulf the mountain heights.

If all my hopes were cast in flesh

And all my loves in bone,

I could populate a universe

By will and mind alone.

But if my fears had voices—

Were my angers strong of hand—

They could crush that same young universe

As he rises to bear his testimony.

I can hear the distant tones

of velvet strings

When the eyes of Grandmother Wooley

Stare back from the photograph

And awaken within me a memory of things lost,

Indeed, things never known,

’Til now.

And sometimes,

a sudden answer to my prayer

at Dawn

Steals softly past the clutter

of the Noon.