Poetry Editor’s note: Michael Lind, a premier public intellectual and academic, is also a stellar poet, so it goes without saying that we at Liberty Island are thrilled to begin featuring his work, starting today. A new poem of his will run each week.
A window pane, a blank, defined
panel of blue in black, you find
as evidence of life in this
indifferent metropolis.
Recursions of a stymied mind,
flickerings magnify a blind
computer or TV aligned
with someone else who is amiss,
a window pane
itself. This midnight is the kind
in which, no matter how you wind
the dial, you hear only the hiss
of static leaked by an abyss
until you sense out there, behind
a window, pain.
******
Photo by cocoparisienne (Pixabay)
Michael Lind is the author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction and poetry, including The New Class War and Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States. His narrative poem The Alamo was named one of the best books of the year in 1997 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review and Bluebonnet Girl, his children’s book in verse illustrated by Kate Kiesler, won an Oppenheim Toy Portfolio prize. He has been an editor or staff writer at The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic and The National Interest and is a columnist for Tablet and Project Syndicate and a fellow at New America, a nonpartisan think tank he co-founded in 1999. A fifth generation native of Austin, Texas, Lind has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
Comments
Leave a Reply