The Vermillion Skies Poem by Robert Rorabeck

My words—vision of a blind man
In the vociferous shadows
Waiting to be fed from the mouths
Of nocturnal creatures:
As the jasmines bloom over dump trucks;
As the airplanes scream like vultures:
That they should have to say any of
This
Another time through the needing mouths
Over my years,
And into the fire-pit:
The pages burn and dissemble—
As my students will get up again tomorrow,
And I will have no voice for them,
As my wife lives in a house on the other side
Of the earth,
And my pity for her burns down the swans
In the apathetic moods of the vermillion skies.