I have strung together the lives
of great unsandaled prophets.
Songs of desert heat, salt, and sand;
no-answer prayer,
and children eating large white locusts.
From this palette of poets' lives
I am quick to paint
vivid pictures of how great
I too will be.
When this intermediary stuff
of regeneration is finished,
I will give speeches to big crowds,
write testimonials.
I will start movements.
Listen:
I will give you the gift more rare
than silence in ambition,
than patience in an awkward day,
more seldom than remembering to pause,
more precious than the other cheek.
Before the pearl, the price—
the beaten will, the broken hope.
No friend will be enough;
no thing can fill the space
which I alone must fill.
And though you will feel utterly alone,
like a deaf man speaking
to small waves of laughter,
I will be the voice within your voice
singing hymns in a cacophony of traffic
