Lines

Before this blog, I wrote a "book length" novel of some of my favorite handwritten poems, typed and compiled into a 167 page document. Since clapbooks (small books, usually containing only 20 poems or less) are the popular way of publishing poems, I never had the incentive to take my hefty volume to a publishing house to be decimated and torn to bits by an editor. Only the hundreds of remnants and scraps of poems I have written remain in school notebooks, next to math equations, between English verbs and amongst scrollwork of flowers and bright-eyed cartoons of owls. They never did make it to the desk of a "real" publisher, and they probably never will.

Here is one of the typed poems I wrote as a teenager.

Lines

What wondrous symmetry that made

The open lawn and the sunlit glade

The pool bathed in the silver lance

The touch of starbeam's falling glance

And frosted leaves, cloaked by the cold

That shiver in their snowy world

Or summer laced by autumn's breath

And budding daisies passing kiss

Or lanes in winding, falling rain

That sad and soft, empire refrain!

A melody of wondrous grace

That some good Lord above hath made.