Miriam Dunn’s “What if” and my response “Might then”

A little after noon today, Miriam Dunn, a wonderful poet and friend of mine, posted What if at Google+. Shortly thereafter, I posted a response to her poem in the form of a poem of my own, Might then, which you’ll find below.

miriam dunn  -  What if

What if I disturb you
with a word
that once lay hid
within a shell
and flew off like a bird?

its careless beak
dropping sounds
that once, they met the air,
resembled nonsense syllables
and reconstruct them there.

Skip Zilla  -  Might then

Might then comb the syllabuses
in a library for a syllabary
to syllogize whether the syllables
were silly spatter
or formed symbols
weighted enough to ponder
yet light enough to wave
across a skyful of minds.

Elizabeth Alexander, poet

Elizabeth Alexander has been asked to recite an original poem she’s written for the U.S. Presidential Inauguration on January 20, 2009. I’m about half way through one of my own making, which is difficult for me because writing an occasional poem is always too intentional a construction. If I finish the other half of it, I’ll post it.

Here’s a poem about poetry she’s written; she read it tonight on PBS’s News Hour, and I copied it here from her website.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?