The Living

It occurred to me that I don't have a single example of my poetry on this journal. What a pity that would be, and to think: what better than a poem to bespeak one formerly known as Poet! This is one of my non-rhyming ones, as most of my poems are written in rhyme. I wrote this while I was still studying at Drew.


The Living

Hunger of the flesh eats like a maggot in the rind.
Hunger of the mind beats like steam in the kettle.
Hunger limb for limb tearing at the old balustrades,
And the granite obelisk erected for the dawn
Are nothing more but a rack of ruins by night.
Somewhere a million stars are exploding,
Extinguished – the supernovas, blasting through the cosmos
Blazing the lonely panegyric of the sky.
We are all dying. It is programmed in our cells.
Six million of me succumbing to senescence.
I am a city, encomium of the world,
And this foot, this finger, hanging on a tendon
Are my sole tributes to mortality.
Like a studded glove it hits. Here is a knucklebone.
Here is a ruptured jaw. Take the old mandible
And boil it in water. Ferment it with onions.
Make bone soup. It is better this way.
From whence it came, salt and sulfur,
Blood and brine. We are all elements primordial,
And this boiling acid soup, ballast water,
And seminal fluid, tiny old homunculus of the world
Are a pot thickened with people. To live is to hunger.
Drive me desire. Take this umbilicus,
Dip your spoon, and dig in.

--N.D. Pura, 2005