Forgotten Poems

Poems stuffed in a drawer
are in the place of the dead,
protected from daylight and
waning of spirit in a wooden tomb.

They came to me unannounced,
almost as if I were sleeping,
bouncing to the paper from my pen point,
their metrical faces both long and short,
their arms gathering in the great issues
of love,
of peace,
of the soul's long voyage.

Often they scream
in their unblessed crypt.
Other times they are barely heard
beneath the silence. Stirring to verse,
they sing to me; short prayers raised
amongst the paperclips and pencils.