As its title signals, this week’s poem rides on some big abstractions, which is not easy for a poem to do. Maybe it’s the moment that we’re living in that makes these abstractions possible. It is also the unexpected swerves of language here, like how the leaders are “spackling / walls with new slogans” and how “We want our lives / to crackle with what isn’t frivolous.”
Stuart Kestenbaum is the Maine state poet laureate and is the author of four collections of poems, including “Only Now” (Deerbrook Editions, 2014).
Civilization
By Stuart Kestenbaum
We could be standing sentry over
Constantinople or Byzantium before that.
It’s a remarkable vista,
looking at the long march of history,
how technology propels us forward
and how conscientious all of our would-be
leaders want to appear. They are spackling
walls with new slogans, looking for
the momentum of sincerity.
That’s an impossibility, as unnatural as
fluorescent lighting. We want our lives
to crackle with what isn’t frivolous.
We want to build domes
that will be shining in the sun.
We want the horizon to be ours.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2019 Stuart Kestenbaum. It appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
