Two Poems by Richard Schnap

Portraits of the Heart

I didn’t know their stories
Only hints from what spoke to them

In a gallery of collages
Where they each made one their own

A smiling man holding
A woman with a mirrored face

A hand in a room reaching
Past a ruined wall toward the sky

A desert highway curving
By a sign with a question mark

A woman on a road wandering
In the winter with her eyes closed

And when they left I wondered
Why they all seemed so alike

Like birds in an aviary
Caught in the same cage

Whispers

I hear the night
Talking to itself
In an uneasy sleep

As it wanders through
The strange landscape
Of someone else’s dream

Where dead cabarets
Are now the havens
Of lonely ghosts

Who cling to a past
Of easy love
A lingering shadow

Like an old song
You can still hear
From time to time

That grows more faint
As it’s lost in the howl
Of a savage wind






Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.