by Margaret Colangelo | | Poetry
This morning,
of all the mornings,
the moon woke me.
I followed the light
of last night,
and walked out
to freshly plowed
seedless mounds.
Shadows cast
like head stones
row
after
row.
And I,
on this night,
of all the nights,
took a seed
from my pocket
and dropped it-
in your soil
just
deep
enough
for its ancient wisdom
to pick up where I left off.
I leaned the shovel
against the
freshly sanded shakes,
rinsed the dirt
from under my nails
and with them,
the past.
"Poetry is as strong now as it was hundreds of years ago. Kendrick Lamar is doing the same things that John Donne did. One of these we love, the other we get traumatic experiences from High School Lit. We might hesitate to call Lamar’s work “poetry” because it brings to mind old dead white men and incomprehensible Middle English, but the mechanics of poetry are all there.
Rhyme? Yep. Meter? Uh huh. Stanzas? All there. Heck, I would make the argument that sophistication is not even a prerequisite to poetry. “Twinkle Twinkle”? Poetry. “F*ck the Police”? Poetry."
Kevin Chen