November 11, 2005

In Which i Rummage for a Pickaxe

I tried to pull poems from the air
Like a radio-- I thought
If I only fiddled with the dials enough,
I would catch the Poem Station.

Poems 98.7! All poems, all the time!

i'm a postmodern poet,
the worst kind.

My Forbears never Heard of Radios.
They mined Poems from Deepest Earth
With Pickaxe and Shovel.

Clangs the shovel, steel flashes. Rubble everywhere.

but i'm a postmodern poet,
the worst kind,
and i can't stop messing with the dials.

4 comments:

Lynn Bruce said...

Very cool.

That's exactly how I feel when I write a poem, and then go read Dickinson, Tennyson, Szymborska...
like they are miners, and I'm a dial flipper. You nailed it.

And I really like that lower case i in the title. Now isn't that the whole point...

More, please.

X said...

Great poem.

Owl of the Desert said...

I love poems like this that really strike at the heart of something. I greatly enjoyed it. As the Queen said, "More, please."

Nomos said...

Yes, a truly "post-modern" poem. I particularly enjoyed the last three lines. To mirror the sentiments of the rest of the commentators: "more, please."