by Frank Eannarino
They hear the sounds of weeping
but cannot see the weeper—
their eyes are deaf but not the ears.
To see sadness and not perceive it,
touching naked skin with all of the warmth
of wearing mittens, and the husband
hears his wife crying like a portrait
of a woman crying, and she hears him
shredding on the fret board of his
neglected guitar, and the sounds
are like notations of sounds rather than
music. They are visitors
in each other’s art galleries, passive
viewers of historical catastrophes
unexploded bombs housed within
a war museum, paintings of detonations
where people that they do not recognize
as people suffer in a kind of
second-hand silence and the therapist
becomes the medium of sensory
integration—didn’t you hear that?
someone just made a terrible sound,
an earth-rending retort—my God
didn’t you hear that?
Author’s note: This poem came from an NPR piece but went elsewhere.
Frank Eannarino has an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His poems have been published in AGNI on-line, American Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Denver Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, North American Review.
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