Thursday, August 25, 2011

Poetry: "Detective Story" by Barry Ergang


DETECTIVE STORY

by Barry Ergang


Crime of passion? Suicide? Natural death?
Is the locked room a key or vagrant trail?
Our only sure clue is the absence of breath,
The mystery a chamber vain sleuths assail
With reason slain straining to lift the veil.
Exchanging looks tipped proud like poisoned darts,
We cannot crack the cases of our hearts.

*****



Former Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Derringer Award for the best flash fiction story of 2006, Barry Ergang's poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. "Detective Story" is one of the poems in Dances of the Disaffected: Selected Poems, available in a Kindle edition at Amazon.com

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm almost afraid to take this as I see it, but I'll have to take a chance and say that it sounds serious this time. Seriously responding, this poem states the truth when it says we can't crack the cases of our hearts.

Sometimes it is just impossible to explain what our hearts tell us.

Barry Ergang said...

Yes, this was written as a serious poem, the detective story premise being a metaphor, in this case, for relationships.