"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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This entry was posted on 1/19/2011 3:06 PM and is filed under Great Poems Online.
This poem by Alegria Imperial, a Canadian writer of Filipino descent, was first published on Rick Lupert's Poetry Super Highway website. "Spangled Seasons" appealed to me, not only for its musical sounds and distinctive verbs, but because it features some memorable places in my old hometown, New York City. Visit Alegria's blog jornales for more poetry and meditations on the writing process.
Spangled Seasons
Under hazed New York
spheres, spring sousing Riverside, earlier
cocooned in the Moor shedding off
mover's trip, bundled molehills against
walls –once sparks we strung
onto a nebulae over
nights on Federal Hill—you and
I trudge on.
Trails we looped
between Chesapeake,
Susquehanna and
the Hudson, Venus sputtering
on Pennsylvania woods these,
too, we tucked abreast in
memory, if Manhattan
spares us.
Our cherry
noon-s have leaped into infinity
from finiteness; as well warbled
peace from cypress groves at
Inner Harbor, dandelions mirroring
our masquerade, a yucca spurting
by the window squirrels flying
a trapeze on pines mocked,
ends of days orioles
griped about—we plucked to
spangle our seasons. Soon mere
revenant: Baltimore winters we
skidded, wincing but
un-bruised. I posed for you
that summer cicadas plunged
into passion deaths, smearing
wind shields Fells Point’s
mists we eluded fogged.
Tall suns now spear
mornings at the Moor, we flex
our years on West Broadway: summers
on a mountain lake maybe, a bowery at
Brooklyn Gardens in the fall, sunset
behind Grant's tomb perhaps, or by
Shakespeare's lagoon, divining
on its surface the play
of wind on our
dreams
