A Famine of Tears

The Arts: Poetry

A Famine of Tears

The Shadows cast their brilliance

On wet and littered streets

Where dreams are trampled

By a dazed and dying multitude

Unmindful of the supplications

Of the teary-eyed prophetess,

Holding forth an inane paper cup -

Like an ignored and rejected prayer.

Even the sultry light retreated

From this disparate apparition,

Earnestly withholding its life,

Reserving it for an echoic new day,

Leaving the mendicant seeress

To grope about for significance,

Unsure of finding her way -

Like a lost and weeping child.

And still she persists, this waif,

Salvaging dreams from trash cans,
Hapless victim of a dare long ago.

And yet she persists, our little sage,

Imploring the surging crowd,

"Spare some tears, spare some tears,"

But the dead multitude moves on -

Like routed clouds, discomfited, uneasy

Subdued reminiscences and stolen desires

Weave their way along broken sidewalks

And among wistful, shadowy figures

Suppressing fleeting dreams of yesterday,

While our threadbare, bare-footed Sybil,

Her sole possessions in a shopping cart,

Divine of the Wrath to come, crying,

“Spare some tears, spare some tears, please.”

But change there is  in abundance

Of compassion there is a dearth.

As with  parched and barren hearts

A legion of dried up eyes stare,

Sightless, seeing but not seeing,

Instead,  judging the malodorous,

The dispossessed child, too early an adult,

As she pleads, "Please, spare some tears."

…

“Spare some tears,… please.”

By

Ric Couchman

November Fifth

"a dazed and dying multitude"
[Photographic Art by Angela Pereira]