Category: Responding To Walt Whitman

Tell me seer, where is my eidolon?
Have I left him in a lonely closet?
Is he sitting on a curb waiting my return?
Perhaps he’s content at the library.

Tell me seer, what does he do?
Does he disturb the slumber of past loves?
Is he haunting friends forgotten and lost?
Perhaps he has hitchhiked to Neverland.

Tell me seer, what does he say?
Does he cry out for my company?
Is he singing ballads of sad memories?
Perhaps he tells jokes all day.

Seer, if you cannot find my eidolon
Or if he has found joy supreme,
Leave him be, but please tell me,
I can always make another.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “Eidolons”)

A blade defiant screams skyward,
Stretched and stretching it emerges.
White knuckled roots wring life from the soil,
Drawing fire up through the elbowed stalk.

Animated by the blade the soil hums,
Parting to announce the emergence.
Fertile soil a soup of visceral decay,
Fuel for the latent germ.

Weeds are but flowers without foresight.
This old cause born anew,
Peerless, passionate, sweet,
Destined kindling for the war.
-T. Weeks
(A response to “To thee old cause!”)

All at once I tell 1000 different jokes
Express 1000 unique concerns
Suppress 1000 distinct fears
Log 1000 unrelated complaints
Reveal 1000 disparate loves

Each word echoes off 1000 shadows of me.
1000 shadows each colored by its home.
For 1000 friends I have made
and in 1000 memories I live.

So tell me historian, who am I?

-T. Weeks
(Inspired by “To a Historian”)

What are you?
I am not a physicist;
I do quantize.
I am not a philosopher;
I do untangle.
I am not a poet;
I do abstract.
You are.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “To Foreign Lands”)

On a stormy sea and tossed,
with choppy breath and choked,
with one shoulder down,
I wrestled the waves.

When, calmly as by chance,
a drifting bark, lonely and determined,
dashed the snarled churn
I grasped for a tale of land.

Though mounting and crashed
the sea refused to yield.
I stood brave upon the deck
spreading my white sails.

Once a weary sailor scorned,
searching for the port forlorn.
Now the loneliness deceased
for another here has trained.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “In Cabin’d Ships at Sea”)