Vox Populi
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Vincent Spina: Passengers
So what you are saying is
that we exist? There are crumbs
of evidence: along a fossil seashore
a pair of footprints buried in ashes
to be discovered, sized up
to an hypothesis we can grasp
and hold in our hands—that love
once flourished here along with the usual
suspects of stops and starts, hopes and
desolations like those flocks of birds
—what was their name?—that darkened skies for days
with migration we don’t see anymore,
only tree branches as evidence bent
by the weight of their absence. In the best
of times it was best to keep a sage distance—
a stiff upper lip. These days
diving into wrecks may produce only
more names for home.
And what you say is true: ghost trains
making and remaking clay eating
and drinking vessels we put on display
in rooms where our most living
took place—living rooms breathing
the old breath and ours, like the strands
of an endless tapestry reaching out.
But are we there?
I find less me each day, spend
whole mornings and afternoons mending
pieces, filling cracks. Yet here we are,
another room the house itself has locked out.
Bad or good?
For now lips are suffered to remember
the first tremor of things gone wrong,
things loved, things mistaken. The tea
may still be warm as are the trifles
we serve to each other.
Copyright 2018 Vincent Spina
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Vox Populi 
A beautiful poem by one of my favorite modern poets, Vincent Spina. He manages to metamorphose the commonplace into bold musings on the nature of feeling, and the passage of time . This ability to expand from close scrutiny has a filmic and resonant quality as the poet’s gaze pans out to wider, more startling vistas.
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