A Man with a Scraggly Beard

by Yaacov Dovid Shulman

A man with a scraggly beard was sitting at his desk writing poetry
When a distracted citizen ran pell-mell into his room.
“Why are you sitting writing poetry?” asked this distracted reader,
“When there are demonstrations in the streets,
Not to mention that the rising sun is sending scarlet scarves of clouds across the sky?”
This was at any rate the substance of a poem that a reader sent to me,
In which he described a poem that his mother had written to arouse him from bed.
She had been looking at a green moth with folded wings, she said,
And imagined that it had been thinking,
“As green as I am against the window screen,
There is an apple more green than I
And a thought more green than that apple,
And a window more clear than the sight of the mountain.”
I was thinking of all this when my sister called.
She had a poem in her hand,
But I said, “Who has time for poetry?”
That was exactly how her poem went:
She had a poem in her hand,
But I said, “Who has time for poetry?
Only the gnarls of leaves, only the knots of bushes,
Only the crumpled roads,
Leading nowhere.”
“Leading nowhere?” I cried.
“That sounds so dismal;
Isn’t there a more cheerful way to end a poem?”
But I said (she said) you should listen to the entire thing.
That (she said, I said, he said) is the gist of it,
And the green moth dreamed its green moth dreams.