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Flashlights

Chapter 19: FORWARD, SINGING!
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About This Book

A compact collection of lyric sketches, reflective poems, and stories in verse that illuminate fleeting moments of urban and domestic life. Through vignette-style pieces the author observes barbershops, cafés, and crowded public spaces, probing loneliness, social exchange, and quiet moral dilemmas. Other poems turn inward to meditate on longing, rest, and mortality, sometimes adopting epistolary or conversational forms. A concluding section offers narrative metres that compress human interactions into sharp dramatic scenes. Spare language, sensory detail, and shifts between irony and tenderness bind the sections into a mosaic of early twentieth-century moods and manners.

FORWARD, SINGING!

Listen, girl, stand there near me,
Give me your two fluttering hands,
Then listen.
Little hurrying human beings
Are important and significant
Only in so far as they can stand alone.
Most of them stand sideways,
Propping themselves
Against this brother or that brother
Or this sister or that sister,
Leaving each prop
Only to carom swiftly to the next.
Now shall not every one of these
Sometime discover
If his prop fall down
He falls as well?
Listen, beautiful child,
I would carve my destiny alone!
As a keen-eyed captain steers his ship
By the light of the far north star
Awake, alert, alone.
So, laughing girl
Whom I call to my side,
Hear!
I stand by myself.
I can love, aye, with a fierce flame,
But I love none so much, no man, no woman,
That his passing or his forgetfulness
Shall undo me.
I and my soul
Stand beyond the need of comforting.
None has power to make me
Helpless, incomplete, beholden.
Now, bright child, golden girl,
Warm woman with the fluttering hands
Whom desire has brought,
Will you come to my arms?
I will give you love,
No other lover can give you love like mine,
Come!
Ah, that is well:
Quick, your mouth,
And then forward, singing!
But,—if you had not come,
Laughing girl,
I would have gone forward singing
Alone!