Robin Helweg-Larsen's Blog, page 27

Sonnet: James Lucas, ‘RUOK?’

My question asking if you are OK
in full knowledge that yes may well mean no—
monosyllables build the barricade
perimeter beyond which we can’t go
into the sanctum where you admit fright,
a precious hell guarded from special op
humanitarian fact-finding flights—
must voice loving concern. And then must stop
to wait on answers truly indirect,
accept teenager-brokered terms of love
are spoken in non-sequiturs and gaps,
a small concession I did not expect
enough to give stalled confidence a shove,
to tell us that you are OK perhaps.

*****

RUOK? was first published in Shot Glass Journal #43 in the International Poets section.

James Lucas’ bio:
“I was born in Sydney in 1965, and educated at the University of New South Wales, where I won the University Medal, and then at Cambridge, where I completed a Ph D in modernist poetry in 1997.
I published two chapbooks in the UK in the 1990s, and my first Australian publication was in Southerly in 1994. Since then my poems have appeared in Communion, Contrappasso, Cordite Poetry Review, Heat, Island, Meanjin, New England Poetry Review, Overland, Quadrant, Salt, Scarp, Southerly, the Henry Kendall Award Anthology, and the 2020 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology.
My first collection, Rare Bird, was published by Recent Work Press in March 2021, reviewed in ABR in August 2021, and Commended in the 2021 Anne Elder Award.
I read as widely as I can in contemporary and older poetry. For many years I have taught English at Sydney Grammar School.”

Photo: “RUOK” by arievergreen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Semi-formal? or Spoken Word? RHL, ‘Life is a Bubble’

A life is a bubble:
somewhere the Grand Druid
dips his wand into the universal fluid
and then a new life is formed, floating
on chance breezes until it – pops –
and the thin skin coating
falls back to earth as mere drops,
the shape and rare rainbow glint gone to air,
and the bubble is where?

Earth is a bauble
in the universal flux,
as it foams, boils and freezes,
just dust from God’s various mucks,
sneezes afloat on chance trans-solar breezes.

The humans babble,
rabble rising from the rubble of other lives cut to stubble,
they burble some Bible as they gab, grab and gobble,
cobbling conning towers of Babel and Hubble,
their progress hobbled by their wobbly bobble,
reams of hopes, dreams and schemes
just a bubble.

*****

Sometimes a chance-occurring phrase in some moody mode of thought lets me ramble wildly through tangled words and ideas. It’s not amenable to regular form, but it’s fun. It seems in the spirit of Spoken Verse, though I’ve never performed. The earliest poem I wrote in this style is from over 50 years ago… which is 30 years before I ever had a poem accepted for publication. I was definitely out of step with the non-verse that then controlled the poetry industry to the exclusion of almost all actual verse. Things have eased in recent years, and dozens of poems from those early years have since been published. (Note to struggling young poets: Don’t give up! But have another career that pays money!)

Anyway, ‘Life is a Bubble’ only needed a couple of years to be published in 2024 in The Lyric.

Photo: “Blowing bubbles” by Song_sing is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Kelly Scott Franklin, ‘ora et labora’

toil and spin
we begin
wool, stone
cloth and bone
fibers break
fingers ache
scarlet thread
daily bread
sisters bend
knots end
warp and weft
right, left
kneel and weep
till and keep

the slanted ladder forms a stair
work is prayer

*****

Kelly Scott Franklin writes: “Alvarado’s painting depicts women kneeling, which I think first suggested prayer. As a Catholic, I’m aware of the Benedictine idea of work and prayer as a spiritual pair; but St. Josemaría Escrivá and the Opus Dei movement have also proposed that work itself, done with love and patience and offered to the Original Giver of Creation, can be itself a form of prayer. I had fun with the truncated lines, and I focused on selecting the most evocative physical objects and simple gestures interwoven with Biblical phrases. Maximum density. The poem was first published in Ekphrastic Review” 

Kelly Scott Franklin lives in Michigan with his wife and daughters. He teaches American Literature and the Great Books at Hillsdale College. His poems and translations have appeared in AbleMuse Review, Literary Matters, Driftwood Literary Magazine, Iowa City Poetry in Public, National Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Ekstasis, and elsewhere. His essays and reviews can be found in Commonweal, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, Local Culture, and elsewhere. 
https://www.hillsdale.edu/faculty/kelly-scott-franklin/

Women Making Textiles, by Mario Urteaga Alvarado, 1939

Weekend read: Maryann Corbett, ‘An Orientation’

If, in the midst of this elated day,
someone took him aside with the stern warning,
Most of your life will not be like this morning,
he’d never hear it. How–while fountains play
beside clipped lawns and walkways arched with green
maples that move to stipple white and gold
on paths he and his harried parents have strolled
laden for move-in–how could he hear? He’s seen
Arcadia now, where classical facades
put a straight face on tanglements of thought,
and edgy spears of light and color, wrought
in steel and glass, look daggers at the gods.

The whole week’s strewn with glittering temptations
and parti-colored parties for the eyes:
gown-sleeves aflap like tropical butterflies,
professors float along in convocations.
Some one of them, someday, and over a drink,
will show him grittier visions: Rumor. Snark.
Administrative bloat. Nowhere to park.
How only summers bless you with time to think.
How even the mind’s beauties fester, vexed
by deadlines, balky software, budget hassle.
How research builds its turreted air-castle,
gorgeous for one day, rubble on the next.

But here, today, does anybody give
a bleep for realness? Let us cleave to form,
leaving him to his roommate and his dorm
and whispering, Here’s the poison. Drink and live.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “A few years ago, I happened to be on the campus of a nearby university on move-in day during freshman orientation week. It was an experience that gave me poem-provoking nostalgia.
“Orientation week is an institution I know well; I’ve lived my own college orientation and each of my children’s, and I’ve worked as a university staffer conducting such events. Freshman orientations usually take place in the week before classes begin in the fall and before other students return to campus. They’re meant to give new students everything they need to settle in and become part of the university community.
“But in addition to practicalities like moving young people into their dormitories — and dealing with parents’ emotional goodbyes — orientations will always involve hype and hoopla. Beautiful campuses are part of that hoopla, part of the seduction of academe. There will also be welcoming events that overpraise what students have achieved just by being admitted, tours that overpraise the campus’s buildings and amenities, and academic convocations with professors in full regalia delivering speeches that overpraise everything about the academic world.
“How true is all this as a picture of the scholarly life? I’ve been close enough to the facts of that life to know that the picture needs some correcting pessimism. The poem offers that but says it can wait. Let’s let the students fall in love with the vision before we tell them the truth.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry. ‘An Orientation’ is from her collection In Code.

Photo: “Orientation week” by queensu is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Odd poem: Parody of a Self-Parody of a Self-Parody: Melissa Balmain, ‘How Unpleasant to Meet Mrs. Hughes’

From the files of Sylvia Plath

How unpleasant to meet Mrs. Hughes,
Who’s so thoroughly, willfully odd.
It’s a wonder Ted happened to choose
Such a creature. (He’s rather a god.)

Her lipstick is always a mess.
She’ll go on for an hour or three
About Nazis or bees—as you’d guess,
This does not get her asked out to tea.

Her headbands aren’t quite comme il faut.
(They’re a match for her queer Yankee frocks.)
She knows more than a lady should know
Of low-voltage electrical shocks.

Come to think of it, lately she’s been
More appalling than ever before.
She looks sullen and terribly thin;
If you knock, she won’t answer the door.

Her complexion grows whiter and whiter.
She wears the most horrible shoes.
You can certainly tell she’s a writer.
How unpleasant to meet Mrs. Hughes!

*****

Melissa Balmain writes: “I believe this one started when a contest—probably in The Spectator—called for poems riffing on Edward Lear’s self-mocking ‘How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear’ (and T.S. Eliot’s equally self-mocking parody of it). I found it funny and sad to imagine Sylvia Plath writing about how her English neighbors might see her. The poem was published in Mezzo Cammin.”

Melissa Balmain’s third poetry collection, Satan Talks to His Therapist, is available from Paul Dry Books (and from all the usual retail empires). Balmain is the editor-in-chief of Light, America’s longest-running journal of light verse, and has been a member of the University of Rochester’s English Department since 2010.

Photo: “TED HUGHES AND SYLVIA PLATH” by summonedbyfells is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

SF poem: RHL, ‘Outbreak of Humans’

Gods! Admire us;
we’re your virus
formed of land and sea.
Air and fire
take us higher,
a plague now breaking free;
a wild agent
of contagion
through the galaxy;
death-defying,
modifying…
infecting all we see.

*****

This brief poem was recently published in Bewildering Stories. Humans have already spread round the planet into all ecosystems like an uncontrollable virus; and now we’re seeing the beginnings of a far vaster expansion, presumably entailing endless mutations as we go. It’s going to be a wild ride and, once we’re established and self-sustaining off-planet, I don’t see anything stopping it.

(To those who don’t share this world view, I apologise for what must come across as a religious rant. Maybe it is. We’re all trying to make sense of a life that refuses to be pinned down, and quantum physics shows no more common sense than do tales of angels and demons.)

Having predicted the future in vague outline, I admit I think the future is unpredictable in detail. It is chaotic and formless… which is all the more reason for imposing what form we can in writing about it. Form is a good antidote to formless times. And understanding why we developed our cultural techniques over millennia, why we love song, dance, rhythm and rhyme, is useful in preparing ourselves for an unpredictably evolving future. We developed our cultural strengths for good reasons, and they speak to our evolving ape core. Yes, things will keep changing; but for good or ill we are social beings, and our rhythms and harmonies are part of what keep us grounded in society and prevent our mental collapse.

Photo: “NEXT GALAXY” by suRANTo dwi saputra is marked with CC0 1.0.

Using form: continued poem: Conor Kelly, ‘Daffodils’

Those daffodils that I recall
While lying on a bed settee
Are faded now, their petals fall
In nature and in memory.

It’s time to rise, to go outside
And head off for a subway ride.
I’m in New York’s YMCA
Undressing for a midday swim;

A poet could not but be gay
With bodies toned up in the gym.
But I am getting no cheap thrills
From dongs like dangling daffodils.

I twinkled at the twinkies there
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance
Or heading for the sauna where
I might get lucky if, by chance,

One of the bronzed and buffed young men
Is eager for my fountain pen.
But, sadly, no one needs to hear
This exiled poet strut his stuff.

I am an old Romantic queer,
Ignored, unloved. I’ve had enough.
I join the hustling New York crowd
And wander lonely as a cloud.

*****

Conor Kelly writes: “Daffodils was submitted as a prompt poem to Rattle (https://www.rattle.com) and was printed in the Summer 2024 issue of the magazine. The prompt was to continue where another poem left off. So I disturbed Wordsworth on the couch where he lay remembering daffodils and sent him on his gay way to modern New York where he had some dubious adventures. I kept the stanzaic form, the metre, the rhyme scheme and even some of the original lines. I left him where he began, wandering lonely as that singular cloud.”

Conor Kelly was born in Dublin and spent his adult life teaching in a school in the city. He now lives in Western Shore, Nova Scotia from where he runs his twitter (X) site, @poemtoday, dedicated to the short poem. He has had poems printed in Irish, British, American, Canadian and Mexican magazines. He was shortlisted for a Hennessy New Irish Writers award. At the ceremony one of the judges, Fay Weldon, asked him, “Where are you in these poems?”  He is still asking himself that same question.

https://www.instagram.com/conorkelly.poems/

Photo: “park, school” by presta is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Weekend read: Duncan Gillies MacLaurin, ‘The Real Pity’

No, Wilfred, I never
believed your endeavour
was more than a clever display.
Did you think you could rescue
the boys in the mess queue,
or – no less grotesque – you’d betray
your comrades by opting to stay
in shock in Craiglockhart’s sick bay?
Naive pretence
is no defence
for senseless sacrifice.
Admit it, you
were stupid to
ignore Sassoon’s advice
and blithely return to the fray,
quite deaf to the price you would pay.

You based your decision
on lack of a vision
and fear of derision combined.
You went back to that battle
where kids died “as cattle”
to leave tittle-tattle behind,
regardless of what you might find.
No doubt you were out of your mind!
Or, more exact,
you lacked all tact.
Death was not your “chum”.
One week passed,
and then, at last,
the Armistice had come.
You thought you were helping mankind.
Your nerves were so numb you were blind.

The telegram telling
the news reached your dwelling
as people were yelling “Hooray!”
You were inconsequential
despite your potential.
What did you essentially say?
“Was it for this the clay…?”
Whose drum did you dumbly obey?
You grew obsessed
with your new quest;
it made you big and bold.
Was it fulfilled
when you were killed,
just twenty-five years old?
I have to report with dismay
there’s no lack of soldiers today.

*****

The following is an explanatory essay by Duncan Gillies MacLaurin, entitled ‘Owen, Sassoon, Barker and Me’:

If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
– from Wilfred Owen’s sonnet, “Futility”

It would have been late 1976 or early 1977 when my English teacher, Peter MacDonald, introduced me, a 14-year-old Scottish public schoolboy, to Wilfred Owen. Pixie, as he was called by the boys, had hardly given us the gist of Owen’s life, death, and poetry, when I found myself pole-axed. I hadn’t got my head around the fact that Owen chose to return to fight in the war that he was denouncing in his poetry even though serious shellshock exempted him from service, when I was told that he was killed just one week before the Armistice. It was too much for me.

Reciting Wilfred Owen’s sonnet “Futility” in chapel a few weeks later, I sensed in poetry an alternative to the spiritual life I had known hitherto. Not that I reacted immediately. I didn’t begin writing poetry until I was 20. And it was not until late 1989 that I returned to the poet whose fate had hit me so hard.

It started the way it sometimes does, with a couple of lines scribbled down just before bedtime. The lines were: “If your heart is your legend,/ if your pen is your weapon…” The next day I sat down with my guitar and put the lines to a tune. Although I hadn’t had Wilfred Owen in my thoughts, I found that the piece was to be about him. A year later, “Letter to a Dead Poet” was published in The Dolphin Newsletter, an internal journal of the English Department at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Letter to a Dead Poet

Hey Wilfred Owen,
where were you going
when you got blown away?
Had your heart been your legend,
had your pen been your weapon,
had your conscience elected to stay
watching the sparrows play,
you might have been here today.
I don’t believe your sacrifice
was generous or free;
the fact you paid the highest price
betrayed “Futility”:
“Was it for this the clay…?”
What were you trying to say?

What use are the laurels?
What use are the morals
in all of your quarrels combined?
You went back to that battle
where kids died “as cattle”
to leave tittle-tattle behind
and claimed you were just being kind.
You must have been out of your mind!
And when at last your blood was spilled
Death was not your friend;
one week after you were killed,
the War was at an end.
How could you be so blind?
What were you hoping to find?

My English literature professor, Donald Hannah, who specialised in WWI poetry, was full of praise.

In 2008 (by chance the year Donald Hannah died) I started revising the piece, enlisting the help of other poets on a couple of online workshops. In the process I became even more critical of Wilfred Owen, and people were saying things like: “If he wasn’t already dead there’s a fair chance this would finish him off.” Even my wife, a novelist and investigative journalist, disliked my revisions. One poet, Janet Kenny, was sympathetic though. She commented:

You must have known that this would upset everybody. Owen is so beautiful and
touches us in the deepest way. But I admire the courage this must have taken. It reminds me of Edward Bond’s “First World War Poets”:

You went to the front like sheep
And bleated at the pity of it
In academies that smell of abattoirs
Your poems are still being studied
You turned the earth to mud
Yet complain you drowned in it
Your generals were dug in at the rear
Degenerates drunk on brandy and prayer
You saw the front—and only bleated
The pity!
You survived
Did you burn your general’s houses?
Loot the new millionaires?
No, you found new excuses
You’d lost an arm or your legs
You sat by the empty fire
And hummed music hall songs
Why did your generals send you away to die?
They saw a Great War coming
Between masters and workers
In their own land
So they herded you over the cliffs to be rid of you
How they hated you while you lived!
How they wept over you once you were dead!
What did you fight for?
A new world?
No — an old world already in ruins!
Your children?
Millions of children died
Because you fought for your enemies
And not against them!
We will not forget!
We will not forgive!

I just wanted to show that there was at least one other naughty boy. I love the poems of Wilfred Owen. I seriously like your poem. It would be impossible to imitate his voice (and
unacceptable) but the irreverence IMO hits the correct note. Your poem is deliberately
“vulgar” and unpretentious and is all the more telling for that reason.

(From the online workshop, Eratosphere, 2008, quoted with Janet Kenny’s permission)

Thus encouraged, I persevered, and in 2012 my new version was published in the newly-founded poetry e-zine, Angle. One of the editors was Janet Kenny.

The Real Pity

No, Wilfred, I never
believed your endeavour
was more than a clever display.
Did you think you could rescue
the boys in the mess queue,
or – no less grotesque – you’d betray
your comrades by opting to stay
in shock in Craiglockhart’s sick bay?
Naive pretence
is no defence
for senseless sacrifice.
Admit it, you
were stupid to
ignore Sassoon’s advice
and blithely return to the fray,
quite deaf to the price you would pay.

You based your decision
on lack of a vision
and fear of derision combined.
You went back to that battle
where kids died “as cattle”
to leave tittle-tattle behind,
regardless of what you might find.
No doubt you were out of your mind!
Or, more exact,
you lacked all tact.
Death was not your “chum”.
One week passed,
and then, at last,
the Armistice had come.
You thought you were helping mankind.
Your nerves were so numb you were blind.

The telegram telling
the news reached your dwelling
as people were yelling “Hooray!”
You were inconsequential
despite your potential.
What did you essentially say?
“Was it for this the clay…?”
Whose drum did you dumbly obey?
You grew obsessed
with your new quest;
it made you big and bold.
Was it fulfilled
when you were killed,
just twenty-five years old?
I have to report with dismay
there’s no lack of soldiers today.

The two lines that inspired the piece are gone, yet the sentiment they express is still its backbone. My new title is a reference to something Owen wrote in a preface to a posthumous collection of his poetry: “My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

A significant new element in the latest version is the fact that Owen’s mother received the dreaded telegram just as the church bells in Shrewsbury were ringing out in celebration of the Armistice.

The alleged advice from Siegfried Sassoon in the first stanza is undocumented. It was an idea that came from reading about their relationship in Pat Barker’s historical novel, Regeneration (Viking Press, 1991), which is centred around the humane treatment that Owen, Sassoon and others received from the man in charge at Craiglockhart, Dr Rivers. Sassoon was at Craiglockhart (in Edinburgh) because his declaration proclaiming the futility of the war had been read aloud in Parliament. Sassoon wasn’t ill, but the government didn’t know what else to do with this war hero turned pacifist. Owen and Sassoon became good friends, and they had a lot in common. They were both homosexual and both strongly ambivalent about the war. Sassoon, the seasoned poet, recognised Owen’s budding poetical talent and helped him with it. There is no doubt that it was a case of hero worship on Owen’s part. Even though they would not allow themselves to refuse to go back to the front, because they saw it as their duty, on a personal level they would not have wanted each other to have to return. While Sassoon’s return to the front was merely the result of a mature adult’s battle with his own conscience, Owen was a damaged young man who should never have been allowed to return. I have imagined that Sassoon told Owen that he (Owen) didn’t need to return to the front, but that Owen chose to follow his hero’s example rather than his advice. Sassoon grieved bitterly over Owen’s death and claimed he would never be “able to accept that disappearance philosophically”. (Siegfried’s Journey, Faber and
Faber, 1945, p. 72)

In an interview with critic Rob Nixon in 1992 Barker talks about issues that were central for the two poets:
Barker: Yes, it is about various forms of courage. What’s impressive about Sassoon’s courage actually is not just the obvious thing that it takes a lot of courage to get decorated, and that it takes a lot of courage to protest against the war, so he’s being brave in two distinct ways. In fact, it’s a much deeper form of courage than that because—partly because of his sexual makeup—he had a very deep need, I think, to be visibly tough and heroic and hypermasculine and prove he could do it. The bravest thing he does, it seems to me, is to deny that psychological need in order to protest against the war.
Nixon: I think one of the great strengths of the novel is the way it deals with the complexity of the condition of the pacifist-warrior rather than simply taking head-on the question “Is war good or bad?” It’s not an ethical book in that narrow, straightforward sense, but ethical by staging the dilemmas of that condition.
Barker: It’s not an antiwar book in the very simple sense that I was afraid it might seem at the beginning. Not that it isn’t an antiwar book: it is. But you can’t set up things like the Somme or Passchendaele and use them as an Aunt Sally, because nobody thinks the Somme and Passchendaele were a good idea. So in a sense what we appear to be arguing about is never ever going to be what they [the characters] are actually arguing about, which is a much deeper question of honor, I think. “Honor” is another old-fashioned word like “heroism”, but it’s very much a key word in the book.
p.7 of “An Interview with Pat Barker” in Contemporary Literature 45.1 (2004)

The ethos of the committed pacifist scorns mere personal safety. Both Owen and Sassoon returned to the War despite their opposition to it. Yet Barker also points to the ambivalence of the positions the two poets held:
Barker: …part of the paradox of Sassoon’s position and, indeed, of Wilfred Owen’s, is that they are simultaneously condemning the war wholeheartedly and claiming for the combatant a very special, superior, and unique form of knowledge, which they are quite implicitly saying is valuable. That you cannot know what we know, and what unites us is something you cannot enter.
(Ibid., p.8)

Barker later states the ambivalence the two men felt even more baldly. She is also astute in her assessment of the class privileges they enjoyed despite their pacifism:
Barker: On the one hand, you’ve got the war poets telling everybody the horrors as vividly as they can. But at the same time, in both Owen’s and Sassoon’s cases, refusing to say the other truth, which is that a lot of it those two particular men enjoyed. So you get an alternative area of silence developing, and that interests me.
The other thing that interests me is how in the second year of the war you had the increased persecution of the pacifists and the increased persecution of homosexuals. There were two very, very nasty campaigns going on. A lot of state spying of a very nasty kind. There was one poor woman, Alice Wheeldon, who was sent to prison with ten years’ hard labor because a police spy alleged that she had plotted to kill Lloyd George by sticking a curare-tipped blowdart up through his shoe. This was a woman who kept a second-hand clothes shop in Leicester. And she got ten years’ hard labor. Unlike Sassoon, you see, who didn’t get sent to prison. You need to be working class and a woman to actually get yourself sent there.
(Ibid., p.19)

What spurred me to write this piece? As is often the case, it was the combination of two factors. On the one hand, my own public-school background meant that I was able to identify with and feel sympathy for Wilfred Owen. On the other hand, I wanted to condemn the elitist culture and stiff-upper-lip ethos that sent an excellent poet to an early grave.

Duncan Gillies MacLaurin, 4th November 2018

*****

Duncan Gillies MacLaurin is a Scottish poet who was born in Glasgow in 1962. He studied Classics at Oxford, left without a degree, and spent two years busking in the streets of Europe. He met a Danish writer, Ann Bilde, in Italy in 1986 and went to live in Denmark, where he teaches English and Latin. His collection of 51 sonnets, I Sing the Sonnet (2017), is online at Snakeskin. He blogs here.

Photo: “Tyne Cot WW1 Cemetery” by PapaPiper is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Using form: unrefrained Villanelle: Alexis Sears, ‘On Turning Twenty’

One afternoon, my father chose to die.
He was like, See ya later, guys. I think
I understand, since I don’t know if I

can hang, myself. But hang myself? (Don’t try,
they whisper, spooked.) Too young to buy a drink,
but old enough to snatch one from a guy

who says, “I’m married, but–” His twinkling eye
is trained, you know, to tell me with a wink
I’ve made the cut. One hand explores my thigh,

the other fingering a Miller. Why
are men so callous? Nowadays, I sink
beneath the comforter. I’ll never cry

because my lover’s lover’s lovely–Thai,
with toned and skinny limbs, her cheekbones pink
and angular. Ohio girl, a Buckeye.

I’m from a land where bleach blond angels fly.
Beneath the moonlight, friends and I will clink
our cups; my wondrous-child eyes defy
adulthood, till I sip. It’s bitter, dry.

*****

Editor: The poem was originally prefaced with “There are those who suffer in plain sight. – Randall Mann”

Alexis Sears writes: “I wrote this poem on the eve of my 20th birthday; nearly a decade later, I still hold it dear. ‘On Turning 20’ made me realize that what I had to say may have been more meaningful than I’d thought.”

Alexis Sears is the author of Out of Order (in which this poem appears), winner of the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and the Poetry by the Sea Book Award: Best Book of 2022. Her work appears in Best American Poetry, Poet Lore, Cortland Review, Cimarron Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her BA in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Editor-at-Large of the Northwest Review and Contributing Editor of Literary Matters, she lives in Los Angeles.
https://www.alexissears.com/

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Denmark is not a Friend’

To poets, lovely Denmark’s not a friend:
there’s too much commonsense, it’s too prosaic.
These blonds just blindly make life a bland blend;
but life should be a salad, a mosaic.
Long live the Christiania anarchists!
Bare feet, graffiti, dog shit, broken glass!
Runaways, pushers, folk on Wanted lists,
the type you’re careful around when they pass.

Well, maybe I exaggerate… I love
museums, bike lanes, all the walking streets,
orderly lines where people never shove,
the clean green parks, the clean stores full of treats…
And after all, I write in sonnet form:
a lovely, useful, ordinary norm.

*****

I wrote this sonnet last month in Denmark, and it was published in the June Snakeskin, an all-rhyme issue. (I’ve tinkered with the title and one of the lines…) The opposing arguments for personal freedom and social responsibility are hardly new, and I agree with both. Perhaps I need to reread Matthew Arnold’s ‘Culture and Anarchy‘… … hm… no, too much religion.

Photo: Postcard in Snakeskin