All The World's An Author Poem by Noor Shihadeh

All the world's an author,
And all the men and women merely chapters:
They have their beginnings, and their endings;
And a page in its time has many words,
His sentences being seven phrases. At first the capital letter,
Standing tall and proud despite his youth,
And then a clause, with his comma
And shining ink, creeping like a shadow,
A myth, a legend. And then the connective,
Embracing two, and joining them
In marriage. Then a final phrase,
Followed by an undignified full stop,
A blot on the page, a chance for swift breath,
Before you are swept away once more
In the maze of words. And then the paragraph,
Divorced from all other thoughts and lines
Tantalizingly close to a new setting,
With premonitions of being the ending;
However reluctantly staying the same. The story shifts
Into desolateness, a world of plain black and white,
With book on table and pen by its side,
His strained hand drops, a plot, a vision too wide
For his blistered fingers, and crooked, gnarled wrist,
Turning again towards desperation, groaning
And moaning escapes his mouth. Last scene of all,
That ends this tiring story,
Is second beginnings, and mere benediction,
Sans letters, sans words, sans books, sans everything.


This is a different version I did to the poem 'All The World's A Stage'