It’s Just A Single Tear... Relatively Recent Poem by John Tansey

It is just a single tear.
All that my manhood can muster.
One solitary, dew drop
forming in the corner of my eye;
The very condensation of my pain
that seeps down my cheek
like the melting of an ice age
cracking the granite rock of my face.
It could be of the self-same water
as Noah’s great flood,
or a tiny earthquake,
the beginning of a rain,
an old man’s baptism
or the first leak in the concrete
that brings down the dam:
My thick-skinned redoubt
that prevents you from getting in!
Look, at my children,
laughing and splashing
as they swim, happily, among it’s bead,
like a water slide, streaming down my cheek.

Then, with the lap of a tongue,
the taste of salt in my mouth,
I dispute such proof, such evidence
that denies, once again,
any existence of such grief!


(JT/5/27/07)