Read Poetry: Scaling, by Joan Livingston

Hopefully, you are spiders, 

scaling streams of silk along the beams of this poem.

If this were the airiest house,

a poem without borders,

a building without roof

but with a wall high like teak trees hard and tall in East India,

walls fourteen thousand feet high or more,

you could climb them.

The younger spiders can 

and what is younger but ambition.

The old are drunk enough with tiredness 

to know it doesn’t matter

this rushing and doing,

this climb.

That death takes care of it all 

in its precise mothering

by pushing us out of this life

to float on currents thousands of miles to the next.

Author: poetryfest

Submit your Poetry to the Festival. Three Options: 1) To post. 2) To have performed by an actor 3) To be made into a film. View all posts by poetryfest