What Light: This Weeks Poem: Tim Brennan
"What Light: This Week's Poem," sponsored by Magers and Quinn Booksellers, brings you a poem every week by a Minnesota poet, selected by a panel of writers and publishers. Look for our anthology, What Light, at Magers and Quinn in Uptown or on line.
dressed rehearsals
father broods on his
three room stage, rehearses
maybe; sips reheated
coffee. maybe he thinks
about mother; her character
now dead these two, almost
three years. outside,
the ever performing moon
murmurs listen but nothing
happens save for moths
banging against a cool porch
light, wings clapping under
fresnel stars. I have
questions: landscape
or seascape? comedy
or tragedy? where
have i been led? it is
as if i am just expected:
lines directed through
forty-two years of mother
dressed rehearsals; cameos
my emotional presence;
perhaps all the world
is a stage, but not all
men merely players:
one is a brooding
director, tugging the strings
of a heart; one is a struggling
understudy, still waiting
patiently for a script.
Biography
Tim Brennan is the writer of the first weekly poem on mnartists.org. He’s been an English teacher and drama director for a southeastern Minnesota rural school for 22 years.
This is the first poem published in the pilot program for What Light: this inaugural program was called “The Poem of the Week,” and these poems are not archived with the What Light poems, so we are seizing the opportunity to republish them as we wait for the next round of What Light, our weekly juried poem-publication project.
