Poetry
jlynch | August 17, 2006Your Friday poem ...
"Epic"
Patrick Kavanagh
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row…
chaoticutopia | August 15, 2006Here are two poems, each embracing a different perception of time:
Vigor
Go ahead...
Walk all over me
I won't bend.
I'm as hard as diamond
Hidden in the rough
Luminous and resilient
Myriad of geometric facets
Layer upon crystalline layer
Depths of fire you'll never see
Without a cut and polish
But thus enhanced
I'll cost a pretty penny
So leave me be, in the rough
In my dark kimberlitic home
Bearing the weight of time.
Fragility
Time drips like Dali's clocks
Slips and cracks
Nothing lasts.
Even now is sliding away
Years trickle past,
Hardly noticed
Seasons blend
To hazy shadows
But the…
jlynch | August 11, 2006It's Friday and I feel a poem coming on.
Down By The Salley Gardens
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
William Butler Yeats, Crossways 1889.
Salley is an anglicanization of saileach,…
chaoticutopia | August 3, 2006It's a dimension of chaos! Shall we battle, or ride the waves?
They say it's a catchy phrase, but I know what they're thinking. They hear words like, "dimension", "chaos", or "battle", and think laser guns and villains with curling mustaches and deep, evil laughs. They hear "ride the waves" and think of blond-haired muscular heroes being cooed at by girls in polka-dot bikinis. They smile, and thus cheered, move on with their lives. Maybe that's what they think. If so, I'm inclined to let them be. Others, who understand why I obsess over fractals and philosophical notions of existence and…
chaoticutopia | July 4, 2006Freedom is a beautiful thing. In some sense, it can be found in every particle, every molecule, and every living cell. (To divide, or not to divide...) As sentient beings, we are mass conglomerations of freedom, individual harmonious machines, adapting by choice to the changing world around us. I've always appreciated living in a country based entirely on the idea of freedom. It reflects our nature, whether scientific or social. While we may squabble about what responsibilities come along with our freedom, we can all agree: liberty is precious.
In honor of this anniversary of liberty, I've…
chaoticutopia | June 30, 2006I promised poetry, and here it is. I've written many poems about chaos, but this one is probably my favorite. It fits about any definition of chaos you can use and explains "battle or ride the waves" far better than I ever could while spewing philosophy. Poetry is just cool like that. The title, "Reminder", is suggestive of a note tacked under a refrigerator magnet. It's part fridge note, part old movie scene, where one character is hysterical ("OMG! Whatever are we going to do!?!") and another slaps them in the face. ("Thanks, I needed that.") Here is that reminder, that slap, that we all…
retrospectacle | June 28, 2006Whilst perusing my latest copy of SEED magazine, I came across an interesting poetry structure not unlike a haiku. What I'm talking about is "the Fib," which is a poetic structure based on the Fibonacci sequence; the lines consist of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 (and so on) syllables. While SEED published the "fib" poetry of Jason Zuzga, I thought I'd try my hand at them in my very own forum right here.
Shyness
Fish
dive
deeply,
mouths agape,
fins proud and ragged,
filtering the oceans apart
until shimmer-hooked and then flopping in boat bottoms,
when gills heave, gasp, drowning in air; eyes…
grrlscientist | May 25, 2006I've awaited this book of poems for years, and now it's finally published! Shannon Borg's first published book of poetry, Corset (Cincinnati: Cherry Grove, 2006), is now available and as soon as I learned it had been published, I eagerly requested a review copy from the publisher.
This book contains 43 collected poems, some from the author's dissertation and others that were originally published in a variety of poetry journals, and these poems are divided fairly evenly between three separate parts in the book. Despite the wide variety of topics explored in these poems, they all focus on the…