What Each one of Us Holds in our Little Fists

It is with a half-hearted urgency

That I thrust the dagger of desperate words

To strangers I will never meet

 

To the kind of life I never imagined I would have

Like a prostitute that does what she must

To feed her child, I to art must glue

 

My special supplements, to implore

A hymn or a lost sonnet I never finished

The hum of mills and laboratories

 

Of our private autobiography

Who will ever know the inner-student

That once dwelled, among you all?

 

It is then with a kind of celebration

That the author cries her plaints and sobs

The terror of our beautiful isolation

 

The neither Homer nor Ovid

Invented charters like us, charmingly obscure

Gold-mouthed, I am sure you understand

 

Even we do not dare to implore

The charity of the times, or lost friends.