CITY LIGHTS (Great Poems Series)
For Charlie Chaplin
I have never known the outcome
of their last encounter; nor need to.
The truth in old familiar hands
reveals more than final denouement.
Yet
too often the blindness of the seeing is the thing
which cannot be repaired. With each layer
of early green shed to earth
youth is supposed to learn, then soar
in eclectic blossom to life’s sun,
mature and natural. But callow eyes
focus too often on the petty
rages. The sharp neon of the system
mesmers too many buds to early death-
their raw, tender flesh once opened, rots-
in a soft genocide quick with experience:
the dancing pulse of city lights
where flute-fingered mimetics
of a gentler, bygone age
flitted to horizon, lost from meaning
like dead tubers in permafrost.
Yet the tramp, still painting lace portraits
of sentimentalism to suicidal winos
and spreading bright flowers from one blind girl-
in her silent black and white world-
to this dun sea of blaring sightlessness, is more
than a root. He is that nurse attending
premature babies yet weaned from drugs
or alcohol; that lawyer defending
the indefensible and the accused innocent;
that counselor working on doped-up kids
and foundered unions of love; that deathless
moth made blind by Heaven’s pure light:
he is
a sunflower, a warming throng of oneness, thralled
in trope to humanity and its multi-toned plight.
So when someone, anyone, next holds your hand,
with anxious eyes, and asks if “You can see now?”,
do no shrink nor turn within
to eyelids uncharted for true constellation
is the jewelry of life in such queried caress.
BY DAN SCHNEIDER
Listen to a reading by the author
(Indented lines in the original have been italicized)