Of Delicate Poems Poem by Antonio Liao

These poems speak their minds
Be it grief
Be it bliss
But what matters most is that these poems
Have minds of their own
And they do not just listen, and absorb

Or absurd, but what matters most of all
I repeat
For emphasis
For you who like to see

The stone saints along the pedestal
Remembered as you say
By the ravages of the times,

Is that
These poems have minds of their own
And they have mouths that speak,
So delicately, that they have threads
Like tendrils that entwine
A fence
Like it is making love and you watch
It with contempt
But as I see your face

You watch it with envy,
Really, these delicate poems, now speaking
More of grief
Of lamentations

Like a woman veiled and wailing then singing
The most beautiful song of the lost,
Her husband dead
One of the time’s war’s casualties

A grief in a song
And you shall hear it, a grief in a song,
Reverberating through the winds of change
Inside your ear

There are no ballads, or odes to your
West wind
There are none, for in truth, in this world
The ballads are outdated
Run over by the grief of the many
Some even still untold
Waiting to unfold

And you are there, how insensitive!
Telling them to have a grip of something else

Why not walk your dachshund?
And watch it pee beside a tree and
There you watch with so much glee!