The Dust of Nineveh

Take a handful of the dust of Nineveh.
In this dust are the once powerful, the rich
                        the starving poor;
the athletes and the invalids, the successful and
                        the unsuccessful;
the gifted and the ungifted, the kings and the beggars:
all are here, mixed in this dust.

They are forgotten, and nobody knows their names.

In a few thousand years we too will be like these people.
We too will be forgotten, and lie buried in the dust of time.
 
 
 

The Discovery
          For G.H.
 

Don’t read too many poems:
        one
or two at a time.
Each poem is a little universe,
it wants to contain
  everything.

“Then you believe in poetry.”

O yes, but it isn’t poetry
   alone.
Music, painting, sculpture,
          drama and dance.
In art, by “imitating”
  man discovered
that he could enter a deeper world —
  a dimension
of what is real, the hell and the heaven
   of desire.

“Then what?”

Through art he penetrated
  to a higher reality.

And of that, poetry is the best proof.
 
 
 

excerpts from The Surface of Time
© 2000 Louis Dudek