Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.

Patrick Daly

61 years old

Patrick Daly writes poetry and prose on his lunch hours. He has published articles and book reviews in the London Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Palo Alto Weekly, and poetry in many little magazines, most recently in Ekphrasis and The Sand Hill Review. He and his wife Charlotte were founders and co-hosts of Out of Our Minds, a prime-time poetry show on KKUP radio in Cupertino, California.

Piano, Fall

Piano, Fall

Brahms is here, these late piano pieces,
   “cradles for my loneliness”,
a rocking of orange poppies bending and
    unbending, a caress, ruffling of a tree
dipping this whorl of needles
and that one, and that, in the light-laden air,
a caress for all who come near, a promise
that beauty is in the world and the touch
that makes the promise good. What pre-dawn  
    loneliness
it must have been to spread such echoes.
The piano is spreading suspicion of delight
    among us as a tree spreads shade,
the breeze twists and releases the poppies.

Such cruelty as there is in the world must be
    a dream.
The undying weight of it.  The crushing of
    what is already crushed
as though one wished to turn bones to milk.
As though the ordinary agonies of the body
    were not enough.
Such suffering must be a dream, surely
the piano is about to say so, and we will not
    wake –
we will never again wake saying What have we
    done,
to hear the hammers start again without ever
    having stopped.

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