our voices waved upwards into a tide that wrapped itself around the island like some great blue snake and i with visions unraveled my body from the great octopus i had slain with our voices
across the island i carried my soul as one would carry a tiny baby found starving and dying back leaving skin shedding and merging with the tentacles of the rotting world my voice walks like a skeleton
i have reached the edge of lagoon protected in the curve of the tidal rhythms are beating down my bones the island has appeared floating perhaps beckoning me to its water free of beasts our voices are saying to our voices
i am the center and the sense i am the sun out of me comes everything
October 5th at 7pm, during Fall for the Book, we will feature a reading by four of our Editorial Board members, Peter Streckfus, Vivek Narayanan, Carmen Giménez Smith, and Sandra Lim.
"Mahon’s role models and influences were MacNeice and the poet he described as 'the floppy-slippered bear of St. Mark’s Place,' Auden, but his own superb body of work from the past 50 years can stand in accomplishment as the equal of theirs. Exactitude and elegance are among its hallmarks; crystalline language and coherence of thought come together in a Mahon poem."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
“For me, Virgil’s Aeneid is partly about continuity and repetition, a setting out over and over again. Likewise, David Ferry’s deep intertextual approach to writing—especially in Bewilderment, which includes his translations of Virgil, Catullus, and others, alongside his original poems—is also about continuity and iteration."
