The Apostrophe Blog
My poem, “Lamentation: A Cento,” has been published in Issue #14 of The Poeming Pigeon: A Journal of Poetry and Art. After ten years, this will be the final issue. Kudos to Shawn Aveningo Sanders for her great work on this journal all these years.
I wrote this poem as part of a cento-centric project during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, my own words were failing me so I turned to the language of other poets to craft together these collage/found poems. The cento as a form is a great way to play and experiment with juxtapositions, to see where meaning might be found or gleaned. This particular one was constructed of lines from poems written by winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature and collected in the classic anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness.
I am grateful that this particular cento found a home. To me it speaks not only to the grief and loss from the pandemic but also the horrors of other recent violence in places like Ukraine, Gaza, and Israel.
Lamentation: A Cento
–of the Before Times
Once we knew the world well.
The sun was mine and yours; we shared it.
Even a feather in flight can sketch
those days we slept in a trumpet—
doors open on the sands, doors open on exile.
So now the sun moves to die at mid-morning.
Again, the shells were falling;
a hundred houses were in ruins.
O sister / where do you pitch your tent?
You whom I could not save,
you are still the one with stone and sling.
Everything has its limit, including sorrow.
This cento was created from the first lines of poems written by the Nobel Prize winners in Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forché. These twelve lines are by the following poets, many in translation: Wisława Szymborska; George Seferis; Eugenio Montale; Günter Grass; Saint-John Perse; Wole Soyinka; Boris Pasternack; Jaroslav Siefert; Nelly Sachs; Czesław Miłosz; Salvatore Quasimodo; and Joseph Brodsky.
The public domain photograph above is of a feather resting on the Izembeck Lagoon in Anchorage, Alaska. It was taking by an employee of the Alaska Region U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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