Make Me A Crocheted Pillow For My Tears Poem by Leonard Dabydeen

Make Me A Crocheted Pillow For My Tears



“You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank! ”
A Song of Despair: Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

This mammoth quake came swiftly
like an unpretentious thief
to rattle my window before I sleep.
Like a drunken megalomaniac
with giant paws it shoved my ruffled bed
and rustled me awake in heart-thumping fear.

In my eyes I am seeing the vista
everywhere the earth beneath
all things great and small
all things awake or in slumber
all things sweet and sour
all things making love or being loved
all things living or dying
opens like unhinged jaws
swallowing everything with guttural noise.

I watch everything broken and bruised
out of yesterday’s shape. More gulping
sound amidst incessant screaming.
The disarray has no art form. It is like a frenzied
dislocation of the mind. And I begin to well
in tears like the pending tsunami. Dry
dust becomes moist on my face.
My cry knows no sound but the agony
of hope. Despair lingers like a dog
wagging its tail for a bite of sandwich.

What vehement emptiness now takes over
where I once stood and watered my flowers?
Everything is nothing anymore. Do I cry in vain
or do I cry out loud in pain? Did you know
this will happen to me, Pablo Neruda?
Wake up and look at me
or make me a crocheted pillow for my tears.

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