Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Two
November- December 2025
Before sleep, thoughts come., poems by Richard W. Halperin.
Before sleep, thoughts come.
Before sleep, thoughts come.
If thoughts come during the day,
I am not very concerned with them.
They are part of the day,
not part of me.
Before sleep is different:
sleep and I are caught in
the same strands.
Maybe we were born
at the same time.
Before sleep tonight,
I think of Arthur Waley’s
170 Chinese Poems.
The best use of English
since Jane Austen’s,
not a speck of dirt on it.
One of the poems is
‘General Su Wu to his wife,’
circa 100 BC:
‘And if I die, we will go on
thinking of each other.’
That is my wife and I.
She died. Here I am. Here we are.
Before sleep.
Watch and Pray
But I fell asleep.
That was most of my life.
That is still most of each day.
Sometimes I watch.
Sometimes I pray.
Rarely both.
This morning, both.
I heard ‘Let the dead bury
their dead.’
All the adults in my life
are dead.
I have been left, adultless,
in the department store,
with others, also adultless.
I watch, not knowing
what I watch.
I pray, not knowing
what prayer is.
Even Vishnu – I think of
‘The Bell Song’ –
is lost in the forest,
Brahmaless.
A pariah saves him
from wild beasts
with her little bells.
When I write,
when I was with my wife,
when I die laughing
in conversation with pals,
little bells.
Higher and higher,
little bells.
Cured of His Blindness
In Damascus my wife and I visited
the house where Paul was cured of his blindness.
This was part of our life together,
because who could explain that either?
Turgenev belongs in this poem, so here
he is. He had to make Bazarov the centre
of Fathers and Sons but didn’t understand
the man at all. So, over eighteen months,
he meticulously wrote Barazov’s diary.
Then he destroyed it and began the novel.
My poems are Barazov’s diary. All of them,
even the political ones, are love poems,
so that I can begin to understand
who my wife and I actually were.
Constellations
The Wisconsin of my youth
and the plaid shirts I used to wear in it
have not been taken up to the sky
and become constellations. Or they
may have been, and my receptors
haven’t noticed.
Babies notice. Babies may see
constellations in everything:
a sock, a finger, the wallpaper.
Some adults do. Emily Dickinson did.
Birds, and some children, flee
hours before a tsunami strikes.
The Greeks built a temple
to Athena. Much of it still stands.
A statue of her was in it. It was
not what she looked like. No one
had ever seen her. The impulse
to build the temple is exactly
what she looks like.
No one had ever heard her voice.
But, based upon some stories,
they knew what her voice
was like: not the sound of war
but the sound of a flute.
Where the Word for Beautiful
A poem by Joseph Woods
in his Sailing to Hokkaido
first brought it to my attention:
‘Where the word for beautiful is clean.’
Snow. Some air. Some art.
Some thoughts or acts.
I think of this this terrible morning.
I listen to Vaughan Williams’
Mass in G Minor, Choir of
St. John’s College, Cambridge.
I once heard Victoria de los Angeles
sing Vaughan Willams songs
at Carnegie Hall.
You could have heard a pin drop.
Even God drops pins.
I think of some friends or some strangers
who did what I sometimes had wanted to do
but couldn’t or didn’t.
It would have made a difference.
I am glad, now, to realise I had thought
of doing it. Had I done it, I would have been
where the word for beautiful is clean.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin’s poetry is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher (four collections) and by Lapwing/Belfast & Ballyhalbert (eighteen shorter collections). In 2025-26 Salmon will bring out All the Tattered Stars: New and Selected Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods. Many videos of Mr Halperin’s readings in Ireland are on the internet (e.g., Achill Island; Limerick; University College Dublin Irish Poetry Reading Archive).