Literary Yard

Search for meaning

By: Bruce Levine

A blank sheet of music paper
Groups of five lines and four spaces
Black dots and circles floating in the air
Floating in space and yet to be found
Taking place in time rather than space
Elusive fragments of sound
Waiting to be combined into music

Are they down in the valley
Or over the next mountain
The composer asks
Will a bolt of lightning illuminate the enigma
Searching for meaningful combinations
In a sea as transparent as glass
Yet clouded over as a lump of coal

The intangible yearning to find the truth
The veritas of a single chord
A harmony pure and perfect as the moment
Consonant or dissonant
Refining itself with inevitable rightness
Holding time in the palm of its hand
And defining motion as the sun defines day and night

Sonorities chosen in complex permutations
By the dictates of forces unknown
Guiding the hand as well as the head and the heart
Hearing each instrument reveal its own needs
As an actor reveals its role in the totality of a play
Transformed on a palette of tonality
Into an everlasting reality unto itself

The finite being the infinite
As colors pass and fade
And reunite in a crescendo of splendor
Formed by the individual and blended together
As the scores of instruments and musicians
Interpret the black dots and circles
Filling the groups of five lines and four spaces
That once was a blank sheet of music paper

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Bruce Levine is a Pushcart Prize Poetry nominee, a Spillwords Press Awards winner and a Featured Writer in WestWard Quarterly. Over three hundred of his works are published on over twenty-five on-line journals including Ariel Chart, Spillwords, Literary Yard; in over seventy print books including Tipton Poetry Journal, Halcyon Days and Founder’s Favourites and his shows have been produced in New York and around the country.

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