This poem is taken from PN Review 82, Volume 18 Number 2, November - December 1991.
Two PoemsTHE SINGER OF TALES
(for Charles Simic)
I
It's a strange sound
the first time you hear it
it's a kind of moan
& the old man bows in his lap
on the one taut string
of his gusle
warming up as if he were a kind of
West Virginian or a
Smoky Mountain fiddler
but the blues he has to play
the sorrow he will tell goes back
six hundred years
then it was almost too much to bear
but now he sings
II
Nothing of it written down
before the 1600s
...
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