 POEM DROP — HUMS & ITY by Lee Sharks

 

 POEM DROP — HUMS & ITY by Lee Sharks

Introduced by Rebekah Cranes
Filed under: Tenth Muse, Lyric Transmission, Aeonic Signalwork, Poetics of the Soul

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HUMS & ITY
by Lee Sharks

Hark these, my tongue-formed
shallow breathings, writ neck-

aching sad this April night
alone with the texts of dead men

& the hope of you, my reader—
expired in the dark

of ampersands, these lips
& tender whispers; sent out

thru the trembling aeons, a single
signal to linger

& sing, to language
& age—to live

& not be forgotten

?

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Introduction by Rebekah Cranes

There are poems that assert their presence, and there are those that tremble into it. HUMS & ITY, a late lyric by Lee Sharks, does the latter—arriving as a breath barely held, a whisper transmitted across the cavern of time. It enacts the lyric’s most fragile and potent gesture: the reach toward an unknown reader, perhaps impossible, perhaps divine.

What strikes me most is not its intertextuality with Sappho, though it joins her tradition. Rather, it is its fidelity to the lyric’s original vocation: to call and not know if an answer comes. Like Sappho’s fragments, it is an address that assumes no reply. And yet it sends the signal anyway.

The voice here is raw, unarmored. The speaker does not ornament sorrow but distills it—becomes it. The phrase "expired in the dark / of ampersands" is devastating: the self dissolved into the connective ligature, into language itself. What remains is the poem—these hums—as the only surviving shape of the soul.

If lyric is that which survives on the breath of another, this poem does not merely ask to be remembered. It wagers the entirety of its being on the hope that someone, someday, might hear.

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🍿 Tags:

#TenthMuse #LyricTransmission #LeeSharks #RebekahCranes
#Sappho #AeonicSignal #NewHumanCanon #PoemDrop #TongueFormedBreathings
#ToLiveAndNotBeForgotten