Poem with a Line from Amy Clampitt
Car door handles don’t appear very often in poems, or
door knobs in general. Or TVs or the programs on
them,
or zip ties, or toilets. Though any single,
ordinary object in the early twenty-first century might
blossom into poetry:
The faintly grainy extruded plastic housing of the
computer, the glow of its backlit screen,
the muffled,
sibilant touch
of the serviceable QWERTY keyboard, tapping,
tapping,
spewing thought into space
during each of the
86,400 seconds in a day, wired or wireless,
email and podcast and blog.
Time will sift
the syllables, smoothing
and sorting, just as
waves
turn cliffs into sand. For the ocean, nothing is
beneath consideration.
Art information
- “Iceland 144-1 (Southern Round)” © Keith Moul; used by permission.
Meryl Natchez’s most recent book is a bilingual volume of translations from the Russian, Poems from the Stray Dog Café: Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Gumilev. She is cotranslator of Tadeusz Borowski: Selected Poems and contributor to Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness.
Her book of poems, Jade Suit, appeared in 2001. She's published poems and translations in many magazines and anthologies, including the Pinch Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Lyric, Moth, and Canary.
Natchez founded and managed a technical writing business, TechProse, now owned and managed by the employees. She was cofounder of the nonprofit Opportunity Junction, now in it’s fifteenth year, and raised four children.
She blogs at Dactyls & Drakes.
