Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Tuesday Poem: Up From A Long Sleep

Conference 
While an older woman lectures us on Habermas and epideictic writing, based in citizen voice events, notions of complication, and public consequence, 
her ideas hang like twigs in the tightly constructed, multicolored rhetorical nest she is weaving, though we are somewhat distracted by her younger co-presenter, who is trying to hush her feisty three year old, who sings as he draws on the back of her yet-to-be-presented paper, by tearing a page away from the three hundred twenty-eight others 
in the conference program, and folding it into an airplane, which takes off from the table, rising and falling at the end of the little 
boy’s arm, until it comes crashing 
down, like a baby bird at the older woman’s feet, and she slowly stoops to pick it up, never missing a single beat.




1 comment:

Michelle Elvy said...

Oh I love how this captures everything happening in this one formal moment. Nicely done. The scene and the behind-the-scene. The boy with his paper plane possibly as important as Habermas?

Or the sheer boredom that a conference of this may inspire. I've been to many of those, ha!