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.