Friday poem: Arrogance by Omar Sabbagh

The Arrogance

Even the motes of dust he petitions

to be friendly faces.  And the undulance

of his desire, the dancing of the waves that mint

the rhythm of his workaday experience,

was always to be seen and viewed smaller

than the truth, the world at large, like the horror

that inhabits it – its beastly denizen – told taller.

Even the motes of dust seem to suit him

and the sparse girth of his calling, the drum

of each moment in his mind the drum

of the page that whitens as it blackens

before him.  In short, the sum of his arrogance

might be found in a space between dance and sense

and sound; a poet, after all, is only a man

in the mirror, making sense of what he can’t.

-Omar Sabbagh