“My Hero”

[If you’ve followed Barbie Angell’s poetry here or elsewhere, you know that Shel Silverstein is indeed her poetic hero. I love this tribute Barbie wrote to him, & while she never illustrated it, we do have a photo of the man himself. If you’d like to read Barbie’s own thoughts about Shel, please visit her site & check out this post!]

My Hero

The sidewalk’s slowly cracking now.
The attic light has dimmed.
The giving tree gave
all the poems she saved.
The bearded man’s moaning a hymn.
The sun is going down again,
and the rain is coming in.
And we search the ground
for the perfect sound
and we wonder where we’ve been.

What common thought has captured us?
Who pulls the fraying thread?
And what can we say
of ourselves today,
when our bodies are finally dead?

And all of our eyelids are leaking.
And our ears softly beg for a rhyme.
‘Cause all that we need
is a moment to grieve,
in an endless allotment of time.

Where is our singing savior now?
Who took him away from our world?
His poems now rest
in his last precious breath,
in tears of the boys and the girls.

I’ve lived inside his shadow now,
for this lifetime that I’ve had.
And his words and art,
from my very start,
have distinguished the good from the bad.

I pray for a new man to follow,
to lead me the way of my dreams.
A genius of meter.
A brilliant new leader.
As my hopes start to break at the seams.

‘Cause Shel paved the sidewalk for writers,
and the gifts that he gave are unchanged.
And I can’t let it go,
since nobody knows,
how to mop up the tears in my brain.


Barbie Angell
© 2009-the present

 

Photo of Shelf Silverstein links to its source at famouspoetsandpoems.com