Alan Semerdjian's contribution to our Call for Poems on the topic of epidemics, illness, medicine, death and healing

Alan Semerdjian of New Hyde Park, NY, USA, has shared this original poem.


THE DELUGE OF HUSHED URGES

In this deluge of hushed urges, this 

leveling corridor beyond the frantic 

carnival house,

I’m starting to understand how the 

secret to poetry is not in the reading 

of it

but, rather, in the readying for it. 

Because the charge is always there, 

we need

to keep the words on hand and 

attached to us for that just moment 

of opening,

so that we may be swallowed into it 

like the rabbit does into 

snake

or the krill into whale. Let ourselves 

give in more often and we might 

feel as if

in flight, a kite-less tail, the wing of a 

plane disappearing into cloud, see all 

this

language suddenly vanish and 

the page it’s on following swiftly. 

And if that

moment of opening is 

elongated like the vibration of a 

single singing

bowl alone and free in the once 

busy city center now 

abandoned streets,

the fall into itself is the poem, and the 

only memory of what we were starts 

to fade

into immeasurable alphabets of 

invisible ink.




APP thanks Alan for his latest contribution