Stay clear of the abyss,
with its sadness and indifference.
No bottle can offer an oasis
from the dust inside your heart.
The shoes and wallets will be
collected. Many will go unsung.
Be as Liberty, still greening
against a backdrop of gray despair.

Whatever is down there,
of the irreducible machinery,
is now a shimmering disassembling
that valorizes, vaporizes human feeling
as it sighs, dies, cascades back to bedrock.

Rising in the morning, I go
to my window, look out
at my city and what’s missing,
those two front teeth and the pits
I’ve been endlessly worrying over.
I listen to the equisite throbbing
of my heart that lives, in spite of everything,
in the radiant lap of today.

Richard Waring

Aftermath was published in Inward Springs.

Richard Waring's poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, Sanctuary, Mothering, The Boston Globe, Phone-A-Poem, and elsewhere. His chapbook, "Listening to Stones," was brought out by Pudding House Publications in 1999. He lives in Belmont, Mass., with his son and daughter.