The Sunday Poem: Working Late

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Mar 152009
 

Birds stud the late night lot, move like skipping stones.
The bi-illumined trees huddle parking lights, dance
the empty parking spots, waltzing without parts, alone.

We click, we clack, we open, close, liquid crystal glows.
We do the work we love, the love is like a trance.
Birds stud the late night lot, move like skipping stones.

The stairwell window’s open. The breeze is cold and stone.
The smokers huddled there and overlooked by chance
the empty parking spots, waltzing without parts, alone.

Last lights are off. Hallway’s dim. The music of alarm tones.
We promised not to stay so late, not to see sunset’s hands
scatter birds, the late night lot, moved like skipping stones.

But it works. Assembly is complete. The work, it can be shown,
a tiny victory; a dinner lost, traded for the midnight glance
at empty parking, spouse waltzing without partners, lonely.

We move like skipping stones through dances grown
To dreams; we work for dreams we only hope enhance.
We stud the late night lot. We move like skipping stones
past empty parking spots. We waltz our parts, and do not dance alone.

Nov 162008
 

…The highway between Kabul and Kandahar was supposed to be a success story. Completed in 2003, it has instead become a symbol of all that plagues Afghanistan: insecurity, corruption and the radical Islamic insurgency that feeds off both.

Aryn Baker, Time Magazine, Oct 31, 2008

“This is my road,” Saboor says: a dust
Track gone the long way through the desert rocks.

He drives the bus, two times a week, trusting
Life and face to dirt he smears across

His lips, a beard to baffle Taliban.
He wears mechanic’s clothes: a claim the road

Then makes on him, a thieving in the sand,
The way last week the robbers burst and stole

The crates with chickens, goats a-leash, the wealth
That masquerades as dirt itself, the greens.

I ask him, does he fear insurgent’s stealth,
The bark of guns, the bullet’s code, the dream,

When east Sarobi’s tea shops dish fruit cold and sweet,
Pomegranates, porcelain plates, nuts and honey treats,
The scent of lamb in stew, the simmering of the meat –

He shrugs. Stolid, fleet. He says, “This is my road.”
It is a dust track where the accent makes the meaning.

The Sunday Poem: Departures

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Oct 052008
 

Life is made of departures:
The passage from the dark
The moment of weaning’s sharp
Longing, frantic gestures.

Balloons slipping out of hands.
A dog’s last stiff-legged sleep.
Kisses in a closet, the deep
Fear there, the moments grand.

The move from maiden name
And the way she feels once
Delivered. A man who hunts
Regrets, and finds just blame.

Life is made of departures
And occasional desperate returns

Sep 142008
 

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?

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A poetry lesson for Bartle

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Sep 062008
 

Richard Bartle has a little piece on the rhyming structure of this lovely poem by Carol Ann Duffy.

Mrs Schofield’s GCSE

You must prepare your bosom for his knife,
said Portia to Antonio in which
of Shakespeare’s Comedies? Who killed his wife,
insane with jealousy? And which Scots witch
knew Something wicked this way comes? Who said
Is this a dagger which I see? Which Tragedy?
Whose blade was drawn which led to Tybalt’s death?
To whom did dying Caesar say Et tu? And why?
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark – do you
know what this means? Explain how poetry
pursues the human like the smitten moon
above the weeping, laughing earth; how we
make prayers of it. Nothing will come of nothing:
speak again.
Said by which King? You may begin.

Sez Bartle,

Maybe I’m missing something, or I’m not reading this with the right internal accent, but calling this “rhyming” is a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?

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