Tim Suermondt

 

 

(USA)

 

 

 

BELIEVING IN IT

 

My wife and I take an afternoon walk

along the river, mixing in small talk

with a little big talk.

 

We love looking at the tall, but not too tall

buildings of the city that seem

to have been made for this skyline.

 

We embrace and kiss like the teenagers

standing in front of a cluster of white

sailboats do, and all the bad actors

 

are washed away, everywhere.

It’s so simple: a walk, a river, a city,

a wife and husband—the world making up,

 

teasing us again into believing in it.

 

 

 

TO THE POETS WHO WON’T GET

A DROP OF INK WHEN THEY DIE

 

Cheer up—the poets who will get the ink

won’t know it, life’s last joke on them.

 

Be sorry, but celebrate—keep your hands

on the keyboard, pencils pens and paper within

 

reach as well—the poems, spiteful, beautiful,

demand our attention and don’t give a damn

 

who we are, who we wish we were but will never be.

A magnificent line is somewhere in the room, strutting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

____________________________________________

 
BIO

 

Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections of poems: TRYING TO HELP THE ELEPHANT MAN DANCE (The Backwaters Press, 2007) and JUST BEAUTIFUL (New York Quarterly Books, 2010.) His third collection ELECTION NIGHT AND THE FIVE SATINS will

be published early in 2016 by Glass Lyre Press. He has poems published and forthcoming in

Poetry, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Blackbird, Bellevue Literary Review, PANK, North Dakota Quarterly, december magazine, Plume Poetry Journal and Stand

Magazine (U.K.) among others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

 

allampoet@earthlink.net