Thursday, August 25, 2005

Thursday

by Aaron Young

Oh Wordsworth would you ever tell
(or give some poetic ground)
the secrets of your ebb and swell
to this poor windblown college town?

if consciousness the root of thought
and zen-like should i nature grasp,
then i should leave. O boy, i ought
to leave this cold and sterile class

and stroll across the soggy quad
and drink in draughts of ear and eye
and though my peers may think me odd
i’ll pour libations to the sky.

The jolt of shoes and grind of cars
and redbrick cloud-steeped roofs conspire
to tell us all that is -- is ours,
but do not contain our souls entire.

So then where should our focus fall?
It lights on her? or you? or me?
but consciousness cannot clutch all
of youthful human reverie.

The shepherd ought to sleep in peace
and lonely foal wander away
and give up his cherubic fleece
to fit the fissures of the day,

‘cuz “matter to” and “matter of”
are academically divorced,
and books and thought and life and love
no longer sail the same straight course,

and modern moaning waste land pomes
envision earth in want of rain
and need a sacrificial tome,
a figure bound by shackles, pain --

a text, a man, one concentrate
of blood and longing, crossbound there
upon blind hills, not satiate
with simple sun-wreathed land, aware

of older minds, two-hundred years
before our pens, but still the same,
the ample longings, hopes and fears
and man-stemmed rage and want of blame

this convoluted legecy
(ignore all academic clout)
of politics and poetry
cannot be forced or hammered out

1 Comments:

Blogger fred burgess! said...

This was written by a kid in my Romantic Lit. class a few years back. He submitted it in lieu of turning in a paper. The teacher, in turn, loved it and sent a copy out to the whole class.

I ran into Aaron on the El in Chicago about a year ago. He was working as a night-time security guard in an old apartment building. He said the living conditions were terrible but that he was writing.

I got the idea that he couldn't have been happier.

9:51 PM  

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