[1795] Broken Hearts

Guest poem submitted by Anne McGrath, <anne.mcgrath@>:

There should be heart-shaped rooms in which we sit
as a collective to repair
the damage done by love, and half the night
we'd exchange stories, share a common pain
that's always different, but never less
in how the ruin's total, like a house
slipped off a cliff edge to the sea
or like a turtle that has lost its shell
but keeps on going, making tracks on sand
to find a refuge up beyond the surf.
We're all suddenly disinherited
from little ways, familiar dialogue,
security of someone there to share
bad news, rejection, a red letter day,
a downmood's tumble of blue dice,
or someone there to celebrate a quiet
in which the meaning is in being two
without a need to speak. But out of love
we seem to be falling down stairs
that never terminate. He left or she
took off with someone else, it's like the blow
will never stop arriving in the heart
as an impacted fist. We'd call the place
Heartbreak Hotel, and hope to patch the scars
of unrequited love and leave
a little less in tatters, disrepair.
I'll find the place one day, and book a room
and talk amongst the losers of a face
I can't forget, and of a special hurt
bleeding like footprints scattered over snow.

	-- Jeremy Reed

Jeremy Reed is one of my favourite contemporary poets. As a commentator and
guide to contemporary life there is none more penetrating and in matters of
the heart none more sensitive. There is always such incisiveness and balance
in his poems, and always such striking and apt imagery - '...but never less,
in how the ruin's total, like a house slipped off a cliff edge to the sea.'
Yes! Isn't that exactly what its like? - and, as in this one, there is often
consolation in his pointing up shared experience. In reading this one I
always run in my own head my own experiences, remembering that one 'special
hurt' above the rest - that we all have - and so, as is often the case with
him, the silence at the end of his poems becomes more like a space in which
your own poems are whispered back to him, and as in any sharing of pain
there is a lessening. His output is quite phenomenal, and there is no
'typical' Reed poem, but this is a good one to start with. As a poetic guide
on the journey he is worth taking along.

Anne McGrath.


[this poem is archived, accessible and awaiting your comments at]
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1791.html
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