Listening To You

I appreciate your need,
a compulsion really, to over explain.

That is why I admire
the ones who can craft
the short poem,
and state themselves with few words...
I rarely can.

I overwrite, overstate, over do,
In a desperate attempt
to try to make you understand,
to assure that you get it, that you get me....

Truth is you either do or you don’t.
And the poet’s secret is to grab
in the first couple lines,
and hold captivated and charmed,
pulling across each stanza, to the final
wrapping up of a trail of words.

We speak to the ones we are
supposed to reach and we find the
voice crying in the wilderness, that
we are supposed to hear.
To the others, we speak a foreign tongue,
they will sluff us off with disinterest,

As they have no need of our personal experience,
can’t find themselves like pieces of fools gold,
lying glittering between our lines....
And we will be bored, unmoved, unfulfilled
by the banal chatter of the uninitiated.

The universe is busy drawing us.
We are simply the wordy players,
on some great stage of acting out a God’s plan.

We are the ones crafted and called,
the ones opened by fire and sword
to listen and to speak;
to uncover and to endlessly seek.