Sy Roth’s most recent poem to appear here was Content to Circle (March 2013).
Teasing Them Answerless
By Sy Roth
Celestial beings mischievously play footsie with little men,
teasing them answerless.
Before Adam’s apocalypse
the earth, with bated breath, lingered in the vast expanse.
Apples fell with silent thunks to the ground.
A train blew a plaintive whistle,
Gnostic challenge pinging from one star to the next.
Shadows dress walls interrogatively with cosmological
demiurges of light.
Angels created it, hidden under the streetlamp of ego
where confounding evil finds deeper shadows.
Was there use for the other in an ephemeral world?
Human heart begs it, for
the end is the beginning of the phenomenology of life.
Adam inquires, telegraphs questions across the stars–
searches forever for the pearl,
answers to the destruction of the Temple,
talk of the unknowable.
