POEM: AFTER A CLOUDBURST

Pause and gaze in awe,

At wonders you alone can see,

The wet sunlit city stones

Shimmer like drawn swords.

Their surfaces cast

An inhuman glow,

The fire of self-creation

Published Weyfarers 71, Guilford Poets Press

When I wrote this, I was particularly interested in alliterative verse, a form of poetry peculiar to Germanic languages, among them Old English. In it, the number of stresses per line is important, regardless of the number of syllables, also the initial sounds of the stressed syllables are often similar, so “awe,” “wonders,” and “wet,” further on they move to the rear “drawn,” “glow.” I still used internal rhyme as well: “sunlit,” “city,” “shimmer,” “inhuman.”

The seed of the poem lay in the image of wet stone after rain, from that emerged the rest of the poem, meant to express the idea of the whole of the self-created Universe manifesting itself in me seeing the light reflecting off the wet stones. However, this idea also contains many paradoxes, among them the glow of self-creation shimmering like a sword, a symbol of destruction. The poem itself exhorts the reader to see something no one else can see, thereby setting up a contradiction. The purpose of this was to remove the distinction between the one uttering the poem and the one reading it, and so to express the idea of monism, that we’re all part of one existence.

Expressing poetry through imagery, as opposed to sound, is also called phanopoeia, and is especially used in the poetry of China and Japan.