Jim Dening
Waiting for the door
(after Kafka)
What should we learn in this life anyway?
None of the useful or professional things
such as polishing a table or a sentence.
Where is the doorway to another level,
where is the stairway, even the first step?
The hard earned knowledge will slip away
and be extinguished on the final day
save fragments passed to half-heeding children
for them to store and spend and lose in turn.
There is a granary of souls supposedly,
and ways of working against the grain
to slip between the cracks of the gross world.
The door is here; you have only to open it
and pass through. The door is here; you have only
to open it and pass through. Oh deceptive faith,
we wait, and wonder why we are not changed,
we spend a lifetime searching for the subtle access,
like dogs sniffing at gateways all along the road.
Page(s) 17
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