Echoes Main

Biography

Sample Poetry

Inspired Poems

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House
By Billy Collins

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out. 

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking, 

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog. 

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton 

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Another Reason I Would Rather Die than be in Language Arts
By Mazin Khoury
(Inspired by Another Reason I Don’t Carry a Gun In the House, by Billy Collins and Miss. DeCourcy)

Just another day of pain in class,
More writing and terrorizing of the hands,
The reading takes brain cells,
And I am not careful, it will burn mine completely. 

I try to avoid it,
But the teacher chases me down,
I threaten to stop completely,
But I know I can’t. 

So I continue to suffer the pains of class,
With nothing to do,
But sit and look interested.
It’s a good thing we don’t have LA today,
Or I might just run away.

The Art of Drowning
By Billy Collins 

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds. 

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat. 

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned. 

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish, 

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

An Art to Drowning?
By Mazin Khoury
(Inspired by The Art of Drowning, by Billy Collins)

How can you have an art while drowning?
Drowning seems pretty simplistic to me,
Not something you can be creative about,
Not something you can imagine about. 

How can your life flash before your eyes?
Chances are you will never see “life”,
What is “life” anyway, an idea?
A thought?
An Object? I don’t think. 

If someone survived drowning,
We will definitely ask them,
If they saw their “life” flash before them.
Maybe they just saw a fish?
Or they were already blacked out,
And only saw stars.