The Lonesome Animal free verse by David Huddle, White Family Writer in Residence We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome. -John Steinbeck
And God stepped out on space, And he looked around and said: I’m lonely— I’ll make me a world. -James Weldon Johnson
So it comes down to us from this God who got shazzamed into the universe and who lost interest in playing with lightning bolts and designing giraffes and beetles— this God who sounded out lone-ly to describe the hitch in his pulse, his hunger for food he’d never tasted, his restless eyes scanning paradise and finding it somehow lacking— this God whose feet kept tripping him up with dance moves, this God who wanted to touch something that would touch back, this God who wept when wolves and coyotes answered him with sounds that shivered his bones. And then this God got it! Lone-ly meant alive. Lone-ly was divine.
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The Talon 2022
…I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: “I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!” -William Carlos Williams
