Poetry by Walter Weinschenk
The portals of my eyes are small
But through them I see the Pleiades,
And when the atmosphere is clear
I see them staring back at me.
My ears are also small:
Narrow halls through which I heard,
One dismal afternoon,
The steady drum of Death,
His footsteps loud upon the stairs;
Steady at first, then tentative,
They slowly faded as Death retreated
For no apparent reason.
In the silence of the morning,
Some trifling sound – a chirping bird,
A broken twig, it doesn’t matter which –
Is loud enough to rouse
The mountain from his sleep;
He lets roll the snow
And it decimates a town
That took a thousand years to build.
And so it is that the enormity of love,
Too immense to understand,
Is born within the gentle press
Of pallid lips together,
And the touch of tiny fingertips
Across the boundless space
That lies between two sets of eyes.
Walter Weinschenk is an attorney, writer and musician. His writing has appeared in a number of literary publications including the Carolina Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Cathexis Northwest Press, Beyond Words, Griffel, The Raw Art Review with work forthcoming in the Iris Literary Journal and Sand Hills Literary Magazine. Walter lives in a suburb just outside Washington, D.C.
