Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One November-December 2024
Luna Moth Flickering, poems by Richard W. Halperin.
Of the Mind
I listen to Mahler.
I when young listened to Mahler
but there is more in him now,
a companion in eternity.
I listen with the mind, but what
is mind? It is not thought,
sometimes I have no thought
but I still have mind. Is mind
God numbed? a little less numbed
when in Mahler? I am awake now,
as I often am before bed. Today
a friend sent me red roses for
his own birthday. Zig-zag.
There is no old. There is no Mahler.
There is only red roses.
Lest she dash her foot against a stone
A psalm in the morning,
A psalm in the evening.
A psalm when I got up dispersed
the upside-down of the night.
Something budges.
Something – Yeats was right –
dances.
A friend now dead
seemed to me to be an actual angel.
We would meet over pots of tea.
He was what actual angels may be like.
Solid. Kind.
The dearest psalm
is a fiction of that.
Possible Things
I am a possible thing
and here I am for a while.
The Grand Canyon is a possible thing.
Nothing should look like that.
Vertigo is a possible thing
while it is happening.
Marriage is a possible thing,
no divorce can end it, it keeps on going.
Tragedy is a possible thing,
which happens.
A composer once suggested
that God created the universe
by playing the flute.
Possible things.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin’s poetry is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher (four collections since 2010) and Lapwing/Belfast & Bally-halbert (eighteen shorter collections since 2014). In autumn 2024, Salmon will bring out a Selected & New Volume, Introduction by Joseph Woods, drawing upon most of these. The seventeenth and eighteenth Lapwing, The Painted Word and Three Red Hats, appeared in July 2024.