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A bit on purpose, my last poem was 'all over the map'--Dylanesque, one might say! It was my quick homage to a unique event that happens to happen in my favorite month: the Nobel Prize for literature.

There is no Nobel Prize for music. Nor for theology, parenting, sports broadcasting and other things that matter. Alfred Nobel made dynamite, pragmatically or otherwise. It's good to think he wanted more of a legacy, beyond the 'breaking down'.

So here is a more serious poem on the Nobel Prize for literature, crafted around my favorite poet, 1996 laureate Wislawa Szymborska, whom I quote here and there:

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Because somebody wins

our shutters open and close,

almost instinctively (a question

for nature/nurture) but surely

beyond deliberately, allowing

time to contemplate and cry.

I learned from literature

the number π—what can’t be

comprehended by composite

means or prime, squirreling

through the world and “all the

bottomless bloated heavens”

of icebergs twice imagined

(being there maybe once); I

couldn’t be Lot’s wife, whose

voice depends on witness long

since dead, yet she says “I could

have” lots of ways to be self.

Because somebody wins

we rearrange our past and

wonder why it is or isn’t test-

wise. What’s Dylan off the mic?

Toni Morrison makes music;

where’s Cohen, for God’s sake?

We crave to view things

certain ways and grant each

grain of salt a sense of worth:

for some it’s Matthew 5:13,

a pinch, a march of Gandhi’s

vision, a high colesterol count.

Szymborska wins because

“The world is never ready for

the birth of a child”, most gently

said, and when that child sews

a button on her sleeve, the

world nods off and angels leap.