Watch and the world withers before you
As you sit and sip. Seats on the peaks
Of stool stumps rock. Staying on wheels
Lateral that lean? Like we are just sliding
Towards the wakes? Towards the streets
And their dangerous drakes? Dream about biding
Time and the tide. Teach the childer
How racist we aren’t. Reach in and neglect
The trails of tears, the transgressions repeat
And the childer chase a choo-choo south
To the mouth of the rivers, to the moats in the seas
And the spaces of heaven to be seen by our watchers
And the holes where hobbits hide and bide the
Time and the tide. The Shire will be razed
Again as the evil gains footholds but
She hates the hillsides.  She hides in Coney,
In Bay Ridge and Rio, in the bowls of seas
Crossed on floating things. And she clings to a hope
Of water rising. But the flames get anxious
So a mother migrates amid the poorest
With turtledoves two she treks south
Pregnant with her God. Prepare the way
Of the immigrant illegal who aims to save
The privileged by hanging. Prepare the way
Of the homeless heavens. The refugee — oh how
Did he die for deporters? The dark-skinned child
Of the Middle East? Mary migrates
to the Edge of the empire. Even the Romans
Meddled in the Middle. And made their Maker
Into their brazen image: a terrorist.

Do suicides always slay?
Do immigrants always pilfer the union?
Or do some save nation states?
And even steal our sins?

:: 58 poems written at 29 years ::

This year, for the 58 @ 29, I plan to focus on alliterative meter. It’s the meter used by Middle English and Old English poets as well as Latin and Greek poets. Basically all epic poets use some form of alliterative meter and it hasn’t been used in English for a thousand years. I will be pulling from the rules offered in Lewis’ article on The Alliterative Meter:

In the general reaction which has set in against the long reign of foreign, syllabic meters in English, it is a little remarkable that few have yet suggested a return to our own ancient system, the alliterative line…. Alliteration is no more the whole secret of this verse than rhyme is the whole secret of syllabic verse. It has, in addition, a metrical structure, which could stand alone, and which would then be to this system as blank verse is the syllabic….

A few successful specimens of alliterative meter would be an excellent answer to the type of critic (by no means extinct) who accuses the moderns of choosing vers libre because they are not men enough for meter. For if syllabic verse is like carving in wood and verse libre like working with a brush, alliterative meter is like carving in granite.

“Vers Libre” for those who don’t know is Latin for “free verse.” Lewis has, ultimately, offered for my poetry just the kind of reaction I prefer in all of my life: a reaction that is, deep down, orthodoxy. A reaction to dead leaves as radical as the radish itself: radical because it is the living root of the thing.

Here is the table of contents for my 58 attempts over the next year. After the monogram, I’m including a quote from Chesterton’s An Apology for Buffoons because it defends proper use of alliteration in English:

58 poems at 29 years old ::

1. Greenwood
2. The Brooklyn Film Festival at Windmill Studios
3. Rio Sunset Park
4. The Ballad of the Writer’s Morning
5. To Jack Across the River
6. To Della Beyond the Veil
7. Guantanamera
8. Mother of Exiles

cover image by Barbara Walsh