Weltschmerz
If now and then the world pain visits you,
you’re blessed. Some live with it each second of
the day and wake to it a dozen times
each night and dream in its grip while asleep:
a lipstick model, say, who’s tongue-tied, and
the gun-shy hunter, and the child who wakes
up from a restless nap in No Man’s Land.
Then there’s the sufferer whose life is bland
or even fortunate, but nothing makes
the pain abate, heat rising from the sand
of peerless skin in waves, cold in the deep
caves of the heart, wracked in the skull by chimes
and gongs and voices from below, above—
a shell in which a grain of nacre grew.
Dan Campion is the author of Calypso (1981), A Playbill for Sunset (2022), The Mirror Test (2024), Star Anchors (2026), and Peter De Vries and Surrealism (1995) and is a co-editor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1981, 2nd ed. 1998, 3rd ed. 2019). Dan’s poetry has appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Able Muse, Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, THINK, and many other magazines.
Amethyst Review 