The Last Lesson Poem by Salvatore Ala

Didn’t the prosody present a paradox,
Our voices in voiceless meter,
Our perceived ideal deceived.
Ashes in the lamp that was glowing?

Didn’t the sense seem fleeting
And it was only ever our feeling
For the heartbeat of correspondence,
The lived thing on a dead page?

After attending to externals
We began with inner sense.
Counting every measure
We saw clearer to the center.

We placed a shadow on a shore
Of eternal whisperings,
And drew a line in our minds
Like the footsteps of Ozymandias…