They’ve replaced your hips with cigar boxes
that once held nuts and screws and fuses
blown years before, but surely too valuable
to toss away, the tungsten nearly intact, and who
can ever know what we’ll need one day?
Where were bones are metal rods instead,
threaded for fittings that are counter-sunk
and set for heavy lifting. This should serve
when the gulls swoop low to mock us to our faces
and the catfish belly-up like buoys,
tired from sucking all our leavings.
Now: a metal detector lies on the sand
bleating insistently even while you’re gone.
Those are pearls that were your eyes:
what good is finding any thing now?
Alan Walowitz is a long-time poet currently living in Nassau County, a suburb of NYC. He currently teaches at Manhattanville College in Westchester.
Inspiration here drawn from Shakespeare’s Ariel’s Song.
Categories: Poetry
Tags: A Sea Change, Alan Walowitz, e-zine, ezine, hyperbole, longing, melancholy, melancholy hyperbole, poem, poet, poetry, poets, submit, writing
Melancholy Hyperbole 
Alan,
How wonderful and insightful. I am pleased that you chose to share this with everybody. I want to see more.
Warmly,
Brian
It’s so good to see you put your writing out there Al for all of us to see….guess there’s more to life then The Mets, The Jets, and The Hat..
Your forever friend,
Ken
Sometimes a cigar box is just a cigar box–except, of course, in a poem written by Alan Walowitz. This is a very cryptic and thought-provoking poem–a poem which I continue to mull over.