The Sunday Poem

Every Sunday I post an original poem.

  • The Sunday Poem: When Is a Rhyme a Rhyme?

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    I am here in Austin for AGDC, after a difficult day of travel. My last-ditch attempt to make it to Rudy’s for some BBQ before they closed missed by 20 minutes thanks to various flight delays. So here I sit with Sonic cherry limeade, melancholy, a Marriott substituting for a garret, to write a Sunday poem for you… 😉

    When is a rhyme a rhyme? A pair of words
    Vibrating twain and twin, a homonym
    A scanty, scarcely fraction time, a blur
    Of vowels assonancing on a whim…
    Half verb, the penult, higher ante, quill
    That sometimes speaks in halves and sometimes sprung,
    And in the clumsy piling on of syll,
    The ables and alliterate undone.
    Is all it is the music? Nothing else
    applies? The quatrain’s break, the plosive sound,
    The prayer on the couplet’s open verse?
    The sense of it, the consonance profound?
    The algorithm elegant, the twinning still sublime,
    Is it still a poem, if we forget to rhyme?

  • The Sunday Poem: Maid Marian

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    Robin Hood & Maid Marian, poster from 1880

    Oh Marian maid, queen of May, born a shepherd girl!
    What have they done? Your flock is gone,
    Your ballad’s of a different world.
    Once you stood alone, you know – you were not just a foil,
    But instead you played the central maid
    As Yorkshire festivals you toiled.

    And then dependency came in, for propriety’s sake,
    For maids alone cannot be shown
    Lest women proper place mistake.
    French, then Saxon, poor and back to Norman blood,
    You stood apart and pined your heart
    For loves you never needed much.

    Your love, your boy, your shepherd boy, now lord made rough outlaw.
    Your good French name Leaford became,
    And you an archery prize for all?
    From play to film and back again, your shape a-shift and formless raw,
    And now you’re dead as roles are shed
    And actors move through dialogue.

    Do you wander alleys now, and shop at big box stores?
    Do you worry mortgages, or giving to the poor?
    Your ballad flows and we all know that stories grow and change and more;
    You may have spent some time with bad boy Robin Hood
    But given time we’ll see the shepherdess back home in her own wood.
    Marian is always there in thought, be she queen of May or not.

  • The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens

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    This week’s poem is a meditation on good and evil and faith and logic via Principia Mathematica, based on the news this week that some genes for violent antisocial behavior have been identified.

    It turns out that up to one percent of the population may have these genes. But they do not always express, because nurture and life circumstances are just as important in whether or not the person’s  actually going to turn out antisocial, or dare I say it, evil. And yet, we have so often ascribed these behaviors, throughout history, to the Devil, or to other supernatural causes.

    I ended up linking this to the notion that religion exists in our mental space in a position analogous to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which in its broadest layman interpretation states that a system cannot prove its own consistency; wasn’t there something religious, in the end, in Russell and Whitehead’s belief in complete systems, in the ability of logic to put everything into order?

    OK, so either you come to this blog because it sometimes leaps from game design to poems linking genetics, theology, and mathematics in rhyming hexameter — or you are wondering what the hell (no pun intended) I am on about. Shrug. Here’s the poem either way, annotated for your (in)convenience. Read More “The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens”

  • The Sunday Poem: A Cherufe Tale

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    A Cherufe Tale

    Pedro de Valdivia

    Ay, Pedro de Valdivia, of Extremadura,
    Do you miss your granite home?
    The Bío Bío shores are flat and muddy waters
    And Mapuches lurk in bushes and in loam.

    Last night the cry of the Chonchon, tue tue tue,
    Called out bad luck for you and Spain.
    Do you fear for your fresh-made town of Concepción?
    It will survive, as you survived the Atacama plain.

    Tomorrow you will drink your gold, molten hot,
    And writhe your guts out on a stake.
    Your foster son Lautaro is now the native general
    And you will die, hidalgo, one betrayed.

    The Pillan spirits of this land have anointed you,
    Pedro de Valdivia, rude conquistador.
    Your small town will one day speak the word
    “independence” in the Plaza Mayor.

    You were the last of knights, you loved the last of queens,
    Your European tale is Spanish no more.
    It matters not if once you were of Extremadura,
    Cherufe sacrifice; you die a myth Chilean born.

    There are so many annotations to this one, that I am just going to link ’em all to Wikipedia. This one resulted from reading Isabel Allende’s Ines of My Soul, which brought back many memories of hours reading into the stories of the conquistadors. Truly amazing stories, full of gore and ridiculous heroism and unspeakable exploitation and rank stupidity. I had forgotten the story of the conquest of Chile, which didn’t really even end until the 1800’s. Read on for the summary…

    Read More “The Sunday Poem: A Cherufe Tale”

  • The Sunday Poem: If Trees Did Not Stop Growing

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    We spent some time today at the park at a Cub Scout event, and I fell asleep on our blanket on the grass, staring up at the maze of intersecting branches, and at the smooth-trunked trees that vaulted to the blue. I was struck by how alike the grasses were, the same shapes and forks and blind reaching for the sun, the way that the water grasses arching over the little stream were hiding tadpoles from my glance, and the way the bigger boughs made the sun dart in and out like flashing flickers on a fish – was something watching us?

    It made me think, if trees are just huge grass, then what grows huger still?

    If Trees Did Not Stop Growing

    The trees are dense with cellulose,
    are grasses overgrown. They fork
    the sky, they prize the stratosphere

    And if they got there, what?
    Read More “The Sunday Poem: If Trees Did Not Stop Growing”