New Poetry by David Ades

Whether or Not They Will Ever Understand

The man tries to solve himself.

He breathes himself in and out, full of being.

He speaks the stories of himself,

shares them, listens to their echoes returning,

folding and unfolding himself

over and over like a worn map.

The woman picks at locks, listens

with her inner ear, looks with her third eye

but cannot reconcile herself to her reflection,

the way a stranger peers back at her,

image not conforming to the image

in her mind. Strangers to themselves,

they can only be strangers to each other,

each one a puzzle, an enigma, unsolvable,

and oh, their children, their burdened children.

- David Ades 2016

David Adès is a Pushcart Prize nominated Australian poet living in Pittsburgh since 2011. He is the author of Mapping the World (Friendly Street Poets / Wakefield Press, 2008) commended for the Anne Elder Award 2008, and the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal (Garron Publishing, 2015). David’s poems have appeared widely in Australia and the U.S. in publications including over 20 of the Friendly Street Readers, and numerous literary magazines and have also been widely anthologized, most recently in Verse Envisioned: Poems from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Works of Art They Have Inspired. In 2014 David was awarded the inaugural University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize and was also shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize.