Echoes

Echoes,

sound bouncing

ideas whispering inside other ideas,

ghosts from the present past

and past present stroll over their own tombs,

perched on one another’s

headstones, continuing this discussion

that began with time, I see Homer

sharing wine and song with Shakespeare

while Faulkner hangs on every word,

Eliot taking notes on a cocktail napkin.

Hemingway cuts with one-liners, Dorothy Parker scathing back,

Emerson raising his glass with sublime words of wisdom picked up

from Coleridge or maybe Byron.

Yeats burns through the night,

Auden and Austen quarreling

with the Brontes,

Pope rising above it all

while John Donne and D.H.Lawrence

share a brandy,

Elizabeth I becomes her own champion,

what else could the redhead daughter of a headless woman do upon release

from the tower? Virginia and Sylvia knew, found all of it unbearable,

Emily hid away like Thoreau, shrinking away from Twain’s laughter,

Hawthorne moralizing while Poe weaves tales of horror,

Flannery, Eudora, and Katherine lament the lack of availability of good men

while Euripides and Sophocles shake their heads in dismay

It’s only when I’m quiet that I hear them, yet when I speak truly,

others hear them in me.