The Candlelit Cities Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The bliss of these words is cheapened by the liquor
And made more anonymous and far a field:
And without even stanzas they don’t even know themselves,
But I have brushed them across the many lips of forests,
And across the cool, always running lips of streams,
Though it means all of nothing- all of this, given to an empty house
That has yet to be built; and soliloquyed- and the eyes of dancers
Stop reverberating like knuckles of sealed tight doors;
And the submarines wait patiently down in the silts of the Precambrian
Oceans, waiting also for something that will never move:
And these words come like the rejected drafts in the pigeon scratched
Jaws of forsaken paper;
And they come without Alma’s brown lips and heart, for she has
Reconciled with her usual man, and now the only hope for these pitiful
Things is to somehow make it above tree line where only the angels
Can breathe,
And there to fling their pitiful wishes out unto the candlelit cities
Of a world that doesn’t even know that there is an answer to be returned.