Your poetry holds picnics in the places
where some would say that words should never go;
there's strange delight in passing through those spaces
where nouns are tame and verbs are safe to know
to kingdoms where you colour past the lines,
where adjectives and adverbs long to tread—
the other side of “do not enter” signs
where rulers cannot reach the words you said.
Yet nothing's for the sake of mere transgression:
your words below, your metaphors above,
with every part of speech in your possession
together make a verbal kind of love;
conceiving thought anew, and giving birth
to cast and recreate the very earth.
May 24, 2010
May 24, 2010 at 11:24 AM UTC
Your poetry holds picnics in the places
where some would say that words should never go;
there's strange delight in passing through those spaces
where nouns are tame and verbs are safe to know
to kingdoms where you colour past the lines,
where adjectives and adverbs long to tread—
the other side of “do not enter” signs
where rulers cannot reach the words you said.
Yet nothing's for the sake of mere transgression:
your words below, your metaphors above,
with every part of speech in your possession
together make a verbal kind of love;
conceiving thought anew, and giving birth
to cast and recreate the very earth.
For Carmen Machado, who is the sort of person poetry should be written for.