Stephen J. Williams

Tag: poetry

  • Prayer

    I pray to speak as musicians
  pray; those whom I trust, more than writers,
    since they may speak without need to tell.
      With this desire, without end of longing
    for that sound to fill me, I am contrite,
  and offer my imperfect contrition
to the hope I shall not end in Hell. 

O God, whose music made me,
  I beg you, do not leave me soundless
    where I am, believing nothing, and my mouth
      numb with lies. I am in pain.
    Say only—to this silent, shapeless
  form of life I have, you might give remedy.
With that uncertain knife I could untie my tongue.

  • [Ask as if to extract admission]

    Ask, as if to extract admission,
    or hoping to discover I am empty,

    What do you believe?

    and I say, “There is nothing
    to be claimed today not wrong tomorrow”.

    I laugh my loud, ungraceful laugh,
    rub two words together, making light

    for a blind and slippery god who, for all
    I know, may also lose his way…

    “My god is the worm
    whose kingdom comes to everyone.”

  • [When he is leaving]

    When he is leaving and opens his arms around me
    I know there is one place I will be small and human,
    Breakable, weak, most unlike my other self.

    Lips should be the most telling part. Kissing the rough,
    imperfect surfaces to speak another language,
    I learn how smart a silence is. And also, how

    love will turn my head off like a light,
    leave me stupid, thick and clouded honey.
    It’s just as well I’m dumb with love—

    If I thought of danger or of pain, calculated futures
    or the interest gained, I would be alone.

  • [Mostly there is just this]

    Mostly there is just this
    emptiness, being

    ignorant of truths
    that might make us happy.

    Dreams peopled by strangers
    I’ve become familiar with,

    tonight, the stranger is a lover
    rejecting me and accepting me.

    “I’m afraid of you,” he says
    as we begin the slow rock.

    “And I am afraid of you.”

  • The high price of travelling

    Even though our eyes are bruised
    from reading all the daily news,
    we think of Rome and Paris in the Springtime,
    of telephoning long lost friends,
    of leaving our hearts on tables in expensive restaurants.

    We are like terrorists edging toward some word
    of reason our commander never speaks.
    We begin by opening a book on holidays
    in Uganda, which has a preface telling how
    to sit quietly in living room chairs
    while they become electric with possibilities,
    and read a chapter showing how to move
    our eyes to the corner of their sockets
    so that we can look (without having the appearance
    of looking) at things we do not want to see,
    then flick the pages for some clue
    on how to get there, but all we find
    are reasons not to go.

    It is yet another year of no holidays
    in Uganda, where we could travel
    with lists of missing persons,
    sit and look at complacent animals burning
    in the hot light, and the chance of not seeing ourselves
    would be unlikely.

  • The whole year travelling

    “I’ve been trying to say this for years
    And find it like a spider on my lip:
    Arriving, there’s a padlock on the door
    Protecting nothing but a window
    In one wall, and a double bed
    Complete with holes—none of which I need.
    My agent provides this free. The squalor
    And the shit coming for me: hurt dogs
    Squeal in the street below; Vespas spew smoke
    Through every crack; and prostitutes repeat
    Their life, life-long story in chopped up verse.

    “I drop on the bed after a whole year travelling
    — Noise, decay, clamour at shutters
    As I sleep, and fan blades above me swing
    In great circles

    “At the centre of the world,
    Two halves scraping unequal edges with each other.”

  • Hunger

    Some of the men cry, and many of the women
    Make impossible devotions. Some others
    Who are neither men nor women go about
    Their work invisibly — or else, becoming.
    And behind a wall the gymnast (having managed
    To balance for a very long moment the spectators’
    Fear of falling) thinks he sees a spinning wheel
    And fire in the eye of a monster. The world
    Is like this, he says, there is no need
    For prophesy — it is all here.

    Watching this trick was a man in the doorway
    Now turning to leave and covered with sun.
    I notice his quiet walk — the way he steps
    On his shadow’s toe, lifting a foot and balancing
    There each step in the light like a wire artist,
    That close to the edge. Out in the streets
    You can see if you look, the Hunger presents
    Himself like a man in black suit and bow-tie;
    A noble savage who’d rather dress than eat.