Don'T Tread Upon My Melodies Poem by gershon hepner

He said to Clara:
'Do not tread
upon my melodies;
they flow
so freely
when they leave my head
you have to give them room to go
wherever they are heading,
not
obstructing them once I have poured
them from my fountain-pen
while hot.'

In deep recesses they were stored.
He waited forty years before
he wrote a symphony,
his first,
and though in time he wrote
three more,
unsated
he could quench no thirst
with surfeit of melodic mode,
or chill
with charismatic charms
the heat that from his head
once flowed
for Clara,
dear Johannes Brahms.

11/18/97,5/2/98