PoetryAloud
David Adès Reads
To You, Reader of This Poem
Now that you are here,
now that you have turned aside for a moment from all the other parts of your life (their keening, their calling) and given this page your eyes, whilst elsewhere the endless ritual of activity goes on -- lovers tender in each other's arms, students at their books, cooks at their kitchens, patients drowsy in their hospital beds -- ask yourself what you have gained and what you have lost, how your memories and your thoughts have changed since you began reading these lines, how different you are now from whom you were before, as I am different at the end of this poem to the man who began with an empty page. |
