Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

In the stillness of museum night,
the mummy shifts in its linens,
dry lips stirring in natrous dust.
The stolen Buddha’s hand creaks slightly
as it regards its empty palm
with a wooden eye turned suddenly
as bright as the orb of a tiger.
Fireplaces puff out the acrid smoke
of exterminated forests, ash falls
in minute flakes, snow’s prelude.
The brooding Athenaeum
thrusts up its temple front,
a vault where books
and the ideas within them,
slumber untouched for decades.