A giant copper moon flares on the lake
in the early dark, and on the car radio, talk.
Talk trying to chew despair. Talk about fear
to hide fear. Talk about talk about talk.
Fifty cents, a dollar a word. It is all just talk
until it isn’t. A day may come soon when
we’ll have to pay with our lives for the lives
of our friends. What else did we ever have
to pay with? What else were we ever for?
Each ripple on the lake is a lick of flame.
Click here to read Richard Hoffman on the writing of this poem:
Image: “Moon rises over Palma de Mallorca” by TheWitscher, licensed under CC 2.0
Richard Hoffman has published four volumes of poetry, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; and his latest collection Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for poetry. His other books include the celebrated Half the House: a Memoir, the 2014 memoir Love & Fury, and the story collection Interference and Other Stories. He is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College in Boston, and the nonfiction editor of Solstice Literary Magazine.
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