Inside The Hearts' Walls

Telephone Repairman
by Joseph Millar


All morning in the February light
he has been mending cable,
splicing the pairs of wires together
according to their colors,
white-blue to white-blue
violet-slate to violet-slate,
in the warehouse attic by the river.

When he is finished
the messages will flow along the line:
thank you for the gift,
please come to the baptism,
the bill is now past due :
voices that flicker and gleam back and forth
across the tracer-colored wires.

We live so much of our lives
without telling anyone,
going out before dawn,
working all day by ourselves,
shaking our heads in silence
at the news on the radio.
He thinks of the many signals
flying in the air around him
the syllables fluttering,
saying please love me,
from continent to continent
over the curve of the earth.

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The prompt for next week is: "We live so much of our lives without telling anyone".

Also, at next week's club meeting we will be viewing photos taken by students in the photography department (I think), and we will each get to choose one to write a poem on. After the club's loyal members show up to take their pick next Tuesday, I'll try to post the pictures or links to them online so that everyone else can pick at our scraps perhaps choose one to write about as well.