Poetry To The Dead

A Poem by Noah Adair

I love
To write poetry
To a dead audience

Ghosts in rows of hollow coats,
Cold hands lifting to throats not there

Dust holds you in the raw spotlight
Like a memory that forgot to land

Only the soft animal scratch
At my mind’s opening,
Gnawing the silence
To bone

Once she leaned in to listen.
Now she lowers her quills,
Feathers resting beside names
No one cares to remember

Still, I remember

I lean out from the balcony
Of weightless, eyeless sleep,
Remember the weight of velvet hands,
And words drifting out
From floating mouths
To settle on memory’s shoulders

I don’t ask them to rise,
And I don’t ask them to speak.
It is enough that the dark listens
And keeps everything to itself