2024-03-09: caesura

scrolling social media, i saw picture someone posted of an alliterative poem in the old english form, but written in modern english. i love old english — i used to read it, sort of, a bit, badly. and if the best response to a poem is another poem (a saying i've heard attributed to stephen collis, phyllis webb, margaret avison), well, it made me write one of my own.

one of my earliest good poems, from my grad school days, was written in that meter, but without the syllabic link between the half-lines. i wrote it one winter while home on christmas break. i just looked at it, knew it was done. never changed a thing. a dozen years later, published it in a literary magazine, as-is.

my social-media-response poem is stricter: it uses the meter and syllabic links. and a thank you to the stranger who posted the original, someone an ocean away, who i will never meet & who without knowing it summoned more poetry into the world.

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