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Jazz Voices of Poetry

  • Home
  • Songs
    • Denise Duhamel - Buddhist Barbie
    • Denise Duhamel - The Ugly Stepsister
    • Bob Hicok - Confessions of a Nature Lover
    • David Watts - Morning Poem
    • Edna St. Vincent Millay - What Lips my Lips have Kissed
    • Elizabeth Barrett Browning - How Do I Love Thee
    • Lorna Dee Cervantes - Not Here
    • Floyd Skloot -- The End of Dreams
    • Ishmael Reed - Home Sweet Earth
    • Lewis Carroll - Jabberwocky
    • Li-Young Lee Nativity and The Children's Hour
    • Marge Piercy - The curse of wonder woman
    • Muriel Rukeyser - Waiting for Icarus
    • Walt Whitman Excerpt from Song of Myself
    • Natasha Trethewey Theories of Time and Space
    • William Butler Yeats The Cloths of Heaven
    • Amy Gerstler - A Short History of Sublime Moments on Hold
    • Jennifer Sweeney - Nocturne
    • Jane Kenyon - Briefly it Enters and Briefly Speaks
    • Rita Dove - The House Slave
    • Ruth Stone - From Outer Space
    • Marge Piercy The first time I tasted you
  • Praise
  • The Mission
  • Contact
  • The Musicians

Nocturne

by Jennifer K. Sweeney

There is a blue city in mind 
 constructed slantways
Along a rippling canal,  
Clean and unpeopled but for a musician
Who plays a harp without strings


The city has but one chair where he sits by
the broad strokes of water.  


A lone streetlamp tends its blue arc of light,. 
 A Persian door   A zeppelin sky.  


The world filters through his empty frame 
as he plucks the air.   
Maybe you hear a song  
or maybe you don’t    

That is the choice we are always making.

 

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