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The Singers

By Todd Hearon Todd Hearon

They are not angels

though they have the hollow look

of beings bred on ether. There’s an air

of cool removal from your life, the hawk’s

indifference to the hare’s terror.

You see it in their palms, raised casually

against the fresco’s surface, as to glass

of submarine or spacecraft, and you see

it in their eyes, oracular, that let you pass

alone to unknown agony. The song

they sing is merely time.

Source: Poetry (December 2005).

Biography

Poet, playwright, and essayist Todd Hearon grew up in North Carolina. He received an MA in Irish studies from Boston College and a PhD in editorial studies from Boston University. Hearon’s lyric, sometimes formal poems are rich with allusion and historical reference even as they engage contemporary culture. In a 2007 interview for the Exeter Bulletin, Hearon noted, “I have been faced with the new artistic problem (new for me, . . .

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