My family’s piano sat silent in the basement,
broken on occasion by fingers balanced
on scales, a piece furnished from my mother’s
girlhood shared by her sisters, who also played
I heard the beauty of Buddha’s mother’s
dream, her baby born as a white elephant
from her right side, its blessed ivory shorn
from her own stomached moon
The last piano I heard played itself
out of my middle school music room,
tonged on hydraulic metal tusks
meant for folding chairs, a soloist’s
solemn opus fading behind a vacant
auditorium’s curtain call
It stood, solid on its legless base,
until toppled, then torqued
through an empty courtyard
and a silent parking lot
Benchless, it was benched
below a dumpster by five
sets of hands struggling
under its overture, the
output of wood’s half-ton,
metal-met clang, the weight
of sound, immeasurable
Hampton Padraig is a writer and adjunct professor based out of Las Cruces, New Mexico whose interests include narrative, ekphrastic, and prose poetry, literary fiction, hybridity, the exploration and (re)imagining of blue-collar lives, the creativity found within and across disciplines, and Irish and American diasporas and histories.