The Empty House

Inspired by a website with a Name and a Photograph, but no Poems Everything was made ready! There was a niche to hold five poems, inviolate, polished, no trace of former occupants, dust free. But already the space is sullied because no poems keep decay from creeping inside. Without the protection of words, even sacred places decline, admit the world haphazardly, abandon their mission... Imagine a family of poems within this house. Imagine how dead silence will be punctuated by the best words in the best order. How the poems will read each other and rejoice in their common origin in your heart. Imagine a wanderer, almost bereft of hope, who enters the empty house in search of mere shelter, but finds instead your human speech. Oh, how it will restore him! He will be human among human things. That is your mission ....