Page 29 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. III #11

Minimalist
The minimal is the intense, says one
whose life has been chopped small and rarely done, a little steak, a little blood, a gun.
The minimal is terrible. The parts
you amputated vanish: nothing charts
their painful absence. Nothing stops or starts.
Eliminating waste, the minimal
is what remains. You call it seminal, but it is bare. Excess is criminal.
So this is tiny. Life, alas, is short.
You don’t need a cast of thousands for support. Cut down. Relax. It’s blood. Enjoy the sport.
On Angels
In derelict streets
full of blind houses the eyes are shattered windows.
When the blind windows open their eyes they will see. Their gods will listen.
Here’s the high gable.
Here come the angels, all eyes and ears and trumpets.
The blind shall open
their eyes and the dumb shall speak, proclaim the trumpets.
Angels are fallen.
Look at the vacant spaces. See, they are massing.
Out of the bare street emerges the thin angel they’ve been harbouring.
The enormous wing
of one absconding angel overshadows them.
Here is where we live,
answer the streets, and the walls are our one defence.
Nor is there an hour
without angels. They become what the street breathes out.
Here is where we live:
in the breathing of the street, among the trumpets.
Szirtes is the author of over twenty books of poetry, his most recent, Notes on the Inner Circle (Eyewear) and (Arc) with Carol Watts
20