PHYLLIS BECK KATZ, POET
  • HOME
  • About
  • Books
  • Poems
    • She Introduces Herself
    • In Between
    • Burning Bush
    • Ghost of Global Warming
    • Her Tulip Tree
    • Masks
  • News & Events
  • Reviews
  • Contact
  • New Blogs

POEMS/ Ode to the Ephemeral

appalachian trail
Ode to the Ephemeral

Keats was right! 
We all write on water.
Syllables entrusted
painstaking in creation
to paper’s thin fragility 
solidify our thoughts
perpetuate their truth and beauty
yet fade away.

In our fear of dying
poetry becomes unequal 
to the task of promise
desire fatal to remembrance
however hard we try 
to capture it in verse. Our words 
surviving as shadows of our selves
can have no lasting shape.

What matters is today.
Across the woods, 
crows chatter in the trees, 
sharing news of nests and food 
communal bulletins.

From All Roads Go Where They Will (Antrim House, 2010)

Copyright 2018, Phyllis Beck Katz. All rights reserved.