Tag: storytelling

When the Noise Comes

Donald S. Yarab

When the noise comes … it arrives as promise,
As liberation, as the four-day week or some such rot—
Tools to free us from the tyranny of distance,
From the friction of flesh, of paper, of time.

When the noise comes … we open our doors,
Thinking the chains have been struck from our wrists,
Not seeing how they lengthen, how they follow,
How they slip beneath the blankets, coil around our sleep.

When the noise comes … the waves are ceaseless,
Each notification a crest that will not break,
And we are flotsam, buoyant but not swimming,
Tossed up, pulled under, in the very same motion.

When the noise comes … there is no shore,
Only the turbulence of feeds and the whirlpools of threads,
The shoals of outrage hidden just beneath the scroll,
And our eyes blur from the salt and the light.

When the noise comes … we gasp between the swells,
Thinking: surely the next breath will be deeper,
Surely the merry-go-round’s music will stop,
Surely there will be a weekend at the end of this week.

But the calliope plays on, and the carousel never ceases turning,
The painted horses rise and fall, rise and fall,
And we cannot tell if we are moving forward
Or if we have been circling the same worn orbit since morning.

When the noise comes … we look down at our feet,
And see that we have not moved,
That the frantic pace was only the illusion of motion,
The exhaustion mistaken for progress toward something.

When the noise comes … we pause for a moment—
The WiFi fails, the battery dies, the server times out—
And in that accidental silence the low places remember:
The weight of time, the gift of an empty hour,
The deep stillness from which we were torn when we said yes
To this round-the-clock tether, this chain we call connection.

When the noise comes … we have already forgotten
What we meant to think, to say, to comprehend;
The forgetting sea is not ahead but around us,
We are already drowning in its medium,
Already borne away from ourselves
While thinking ourselves urgent, essential, awake.

When the noise comes … no one comes to save us,
For we have built the flood with our own hands,
Subscribed to the deluge, optimized the overwhelm,
And called it opportunity, flexibility, freedom—
The chains that followed us home,
That slipped into our beds,
That wind around us even now as we try to sleep,
As we remember sleep,
As we forget what sleep was.

Of Goose and Grin: When Tales Step Off the Page

What happens when the characters tumble from their tales? When rhyme stumbles, and the Goose remembers? In this playful and poignant poem, nursery rhymes unravel, fairy tales awaken, and the stories themselves walk past their plots. “Once Upon Askew” is a whimsical reflection on the lives of stories—and those who dwell within them.

child reading book in front of shelves of books
Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

Once Upon Askew

or, The Story That Would Not Sit Still
by Donald S. Yarab

Listen, child—I am the Old Grey Goose,
And I was there when books came loose,
When volumes tumbled, pages flew,
And all the stories mixed like stew.

It started with a mighty thud—
Books falling open, words like mud,
All swirling, mingling, line by line,
Till Alice’s world came mixing into mine.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” she cried,
Right into Cow’s green pasture-side,
Where “Hey Diddle Diddle” used to play—
Now Cow asks questions all the day.

The Spoon caught Alice’s strange delight,
Abandoned dishes, fled by night,
Beneath a moon from whose bright story—
From Carroll’s tale or Goose’s glory?

I squawked from my own tumbled page—
Which book? What tale? What ancient age?
While Cat’s grin stretched across our scene,
Belonging nowhere, everywhere seen.

We passed the wall where once he sat—
Poor Humpty, puzzled, round, and flat.
Though patched, he watches, cracked but clear,
And murmurs, “Not all ends end in fear.”

But one lay still beyond the swirl—
A slumbering, untouched young girl.
The tales all passed; she did not wake,
No prince, no plot her trance to break.
Yet in her stillness, something stirred—
A dream not shaped by spoken word.

We found Red Riding Hood alone,
Her basket lost, her sure path gone.
The Wolf came next—not sly, but stunned,
As if unsure what he had done.
They walked apart, then side by side,
Two stories stripped of fear and pride,
Each wondering if what they knew
Was ever really, wholly true.

So off we walked, this mixed-up crew:
Alice with questions, Cow with moo
That carried wisdom, Spoon with light
From every moon and every night.

Behind us trailed the broken bits—
Half-rhymes and verbs that sought their fits,
Metaphors in mismatched dancing shoes,
Still seeking out their missing clues.

No longer bound by story’s rules,
We’d become something new, no fools—
Not quite the characters we’d been,
Not free of them—but in between.

And hovering above our band,
That smile from Cheshire’s distant land—
A grin that needs no cat to hold,
A question that will not be told.

This is what happens, child, you see,
When stories tumble, wild and free—
They find they’re more alike than not,
And walk together past their plot.