I'm going to share with you another of my friend Lee H. McCormack's poems. He has such a knack for reaching deep and plucking heart- and thought-strings you never knew you possessed.
Kalliope
Means "beautiful voice" from Greek καλλος (kallos) "beauty" and οψ (ops) "voice". In Greek mythology she was a goddess of epic poetry and eloquence, one of the nine Muses.
Join us every Tuesday afternoon at the Daily Kos community political poetry club.
Your own poetry is always welcome in the comments.
Bongos, berets & turtle neck sweaters optional.
The keyboard is mightier than the sword.
When You Take the Body Away From the Animal
The world is diminished and uncertain loneliness
becomes the cellular space once occupied
that lingers relentlessly behind all protestations
and affirmations of innocence or love or the luck
some have in their affections towards another
who might be the one spoken of but not received
desired but not believed, as each unneeded departure
from form becomes an emptiness that fills the
atmosphere within us shapelessly with a
withered rage of dimming twilight memory
Absences are animals in the body that are
no longer anything life intended them to be
solid and whole as flesh is while we are held
magnetically in the mirrored shape these cells
so often see in another's eyes with love or hate
while alive or just as often if and when we are dying
the same as those whose names we barely remember
but whose shapes become the longed for regrets
we struggle to accept in going about the daily
hunger feeding our needs into forgetting
When you take away the body you take away the animal
in its radiant, tense and urgent beauty that once was balancing
the world between our future life and present death
LHM © 2014
(Original poem and accompanying image can be found here:
https://www.facebook.com/...)
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