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Spoke the Mansion
All around be the space of a halcyon day,
Some salon where discussion meets wine and croquet;
There are salads of crab, on the sun-mottled court
For my gracious old neighbor, the stone-crafted fort.
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I Heard the Geese
I heard the geese go flying by,
In succession, crying high,
Amid the early Autumn frais,
At Summer’s end before the day.
O turning year of liminal;
O burning clear ephemeral.
frais: French for “cool”
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Stranger within the Gates
Who would I house in my basement,
If things came to push and to shove,
With food and a bed, never mind rent,
Just who would I welcome in love?
By nature I follow the Dutch,
Corrie and Betsey and such,
I’ve read “Schindler’s List” several times,
And heard across leagues, across climes,
That attitudes travel, and blow;
And should an extreme crisis grow,
How can I not share my place?
A light in the gloam, and a space.
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Of Sweat and of Sleep
last day, Virginia wine harvest
Oil and water that spring from within
Surpass an anointing upon my dry skin.
Natural somnolence, working till done
Is better than drinking from 9 until 1.
Humbleness, thriftiness: things that are free
And beat a short shrift by what’s costly to me.
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Alec Ream is a writer living in Virginia. His poetic work and creative fiction have been widely published. A member of the Demosthenian Literary Society at UGA, he wrote on Lookout Mountain, and continued to write, lecture and work for Delta Kappa Epsilon HQ. He was first published reading to the pledge class of Michigan DKE, in Ann Arbor in 2008. Recently, his poem Green Fire was read at the Washington Literary Society & Debating Union at UVA.
The wild geese were always a ritual with my mother; She understood the wild, and the turning of the earth. Thanks so much for reminding me of it with your lovely poem.
Almost, but not quite. Though “Natural somnolence, working till done/Is better than drinking from 9 until 1.” is an extremely funny couplet. These poems, for the most part, lack a consistent metrical structure and are rhetorically incondite.
Trust CB to come up with the one word which – in its purest adjectival form – could not be bettered by any other word to describe the above pieces . . . “incondite”.
Mr. Ream,
Here is a comment by a rank amateur. “Spoke the Mansion” is wonderful, lackng neither in meter nor rhyme. But the second one my understanding fails: You heard the geese go flying by – and this, “before the day” has begun? Do geese fly by, honking, at night? “Liminal” I take it refers to the border between summer and fall – or is it between night and day? Couldn’t be the latter – this takes place “before the day.” And this: “liminal” is not really a rhyme with “ephemeral,” alhough sound-alike is fair enough; but why is any of the action described – the sound of geese overhead, or border of day/night or summer/fall, ephemeral? Help me, I am no critic.
. . help us all.