The Northville Review
an online literary journal
Winging the Watersheds

L. Ward Abel

When the house is quiet
a breathing develops
in common with the walls.
I wonder about the meaning
of silence as I inhale
all the air that ever was in this small city
of zeros and one without purpose.

Later I’ll take my guitar
to the park.   They tell me
I have a permit to play.   I’m glad
the city will permit me to play.
As my friends join in, there may be songs
we sing that we don’t know.
Like life: winging the watersheds.

There’s no return to morning,
just new mornings, new pauses
to fill with spurs of the moment.
Then we all breathe, and sing,
and talk with no one taking it down
for all its profundity, a gigantic carrying-on
of passers by and sleepers.

About the author

Poet, composer of music (Max Able / Abel, Rawls & Hayes), lawyer and spoken-word performer (Scapeweavel), L. Ward Abel lives in rural Georgia, USA, and has had hundreds of his poems published in the U.S., Europe and Asia. He is the author of Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006) and newly released The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008).