OFTEN THERE’S A WHISPER that I hear in shadowed streets.
A breath of desperation from the tall, far-seeing clouds
Or gasp of outrage from a manhole cover—something meets
Between the earth and sky, in pain, and if the shifting crowds
Can sense it, their response is only in their frightened eyes.
The very breezes pick their way among the alleyways
As if afraid of something in the gray December skies,
Or listening to the heartbeat of these hollow latter days.
Ride on, Messiah—there’s no place for you behind the wheel.
You’ve come too late to sell your closing chapters, for our hands
Have written us an epitaph in rust, on dusty steel.
We’re pulled aside and served with debts and overdue demands
By angry, ragged shapes that once were us; and when we pay
We’ll wait in neatly ordered lines to sign our souls away.
—from the unpublished
Poems of Rufus Pennick