“The strong survive, and all of that,” he’d tell the limply dangling cloth between his beak, a former moth, but doesn’t sense the lunging cat,
who doesn’t think the wheels that run consider cats their proper prey. Yet, now he’s just a dead display beneath the slowly dying sun.
Who knows if later down the road that truck won’t strike a rotting tree and bring to bear on top of me its paralyzing wooden load?
Though like a reel of comic scenes, it’s also how our stories go: the endings are the same, we know, but brought about by varied means.
*****
Paul Burgess writes: “Earlier in the summer, a bird appeared in front of me casually holding a dying moth and looking almost cheerful. The encounter got me thinking about deaths that come suddenly, without malice, and without much meaning to the creatures or things that have caused them. I can’t say exactly why, but some combination of my mood and the circumstances made the sight more vivid and significant to me than it might have been on another day.”
‘Another Old, Familiar Story’ was first published in Snakeskin.
Paul Burgess is the sole proprietor of a business in Lexington, Kentucky that offers ESL classes in addition to English, Japanese, and Spanish-language translation and interpretation services. He has recently contributed work to The Road Not Taken, Blue Unicorn, Light, The Orchards, Pulsebeat, Snakeskin, Lighten Up Online, and several other publications. https://paulburgesswritingandlanguage.blog/
Odysseus, the master home again after long wandering strange lands and seas, contending twenty years with monsters, men, and gods, observed his dog beset with fleas, decrepit, curled upon a pile of dung, ignored, abandoned by a careless world.
Thus lay Argos. Swarms of flies buzzed and swirled around his wasted body. His head hung. His legs lacked strength to stand. But that one voice he knew. A scent he’d always recognize. The man, to guard his beggarly disguise, withheld all signs of care. He had no choice.
The dog’s ears pricked. He feebly wagged his tail. Then knowing that his master had returned he died. Odysseus shed hidden tears. He dared not stroke the dog. Within he burned. This final comrade lost to no avail, and lost forever all those missing years.
***** Richard Meyer writes: “After many decades, I’m reading The Odyssey again, the highly acclaimed translation by Robert Fitzgerald (1961). It won major awards and is considered a classic. Selections from the Fitzgerald translation were in high school English textbooks for years, including the one I used when teaching. I was prompted to revisit The Odyssey after seeing Christopher Nolan’s much talked about recent film adaptation of the ancient epic. The scene with Odysseus and his old dog Argos is one of the well-known episodes in The Odyssey, and a few days ago I had the notion to condense the scene into a modern poem. Most of my poems are written in the new formalism style, using rhyme, meter, and the traditional tools of poetry. In ‘Argos’ I use an irregular rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter meter, with occasional metrical variations for effect.”
‘Argos’ was first published in Facebook.
Richard Meyer, a former English and humanities teacher, lives in Mankato, MN. His book of poems Orbital Paths was a silver medalist winner in the 2016 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards. He was awarded the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize for his poem “Fieldstone.” His poetry has appeared in a variety of print and online journals and has also received top honors several times in the Great River Shakespeare Festival sonnet contest. He is also the author of Wise Heart, a memoir of his mother Gert who was born in poverty, came of age during the Great Depression, enlisted in the army during World War II, served overseas, achieved the rank of first sergeant, and was awarded the Bronze Star for meritorious service performed during the Battle of the Bulge. Richard’s most recent book is Stumbling Onward, a collection of new and selected poems – and a 2026 revision contains over 50 new poems. His books are available on Amazon.
Shouldn’t the moment be more–well, dramatic? Shouldn’t it toll like Donne’s dead-bell? But no. Mere paper-rustling. It’s a burst of static That stutters off to silence, while late snow Alights outside and melts forgettably, A numb reminder. Nothing I can see In the small print addresses dread, or God, Or love. Somber reflection? Not a bit. Forms in quadruplicate: White over yellow, pink, and goldenrod,
For a dead end. No hymns, no holiness– No funeral; every gathering spreads the plague. Perfunctory forms depress me, and they press Me now, because I’ve left so much so vague. When until now has dying loomed so real I shrank from my dead flesh? Or when did I feel This keen to leave less horror for my son And daughter? Save them shock-and-awe about Choices, when mine run out? I mutter grimly, I will get this done.
And still I sit here, playing my numbers game, Tossing my rhyme-pairs into the winds of fear. Back to the labor. Back to the minor shame Of shuffling off my life (check there, sign here). Earth gets my ashes–grudgingly, on terms That reek of real estate and legal firms. Transfer-on-death arrangements and new will Spew gray phrases: drone and drone and drone. Like worrying a bone, This work to stifle terrors I can’t kill.
So work–bending the spirit to the letter, Bowing the head at how the flesh unweaves– Goes down like a stiff drink; the ache’s no better Yet, for the iron aftertaste it leaves. Here, plague: take this dull prose; spare those I love. I sign at all the Xs (and to prove My resoluteness, press hard on the pen), Scribble the check and seal the envelope. Clinging weakly to hope, I thumb the stamp on. No one says Amen.
*****
Maryann Corbett writes: “It’s clear, I think, that this poem (first published in Modern Age) dates from the worst days of the Covid pandemic, in 2020 when there was no vaccine, when isolation was the only control, and when the thought of death was pervasive. As my own age cohort was dying in droves, I did think it prudent to make plans in case the worst happened. My ruminations on the process arranged themselves in a shape like that of Larkin’s Aubade.”
‘Buying a Plot in Plague Time’, first published in Modern Age, is collected in The O in the Air.
Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry. A seventh book, Notifications from the Unseen, is forthcoming from Slant Books.”
And the rest, a few, Escape their prison and depart On the wide ocean of life anew. There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart Listeth, will sail; Nor doth he know how there prevail, Despotic on that sea, Trade-winds which cross it from eternity. Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred By thwarting signs, and braves The freshening wind and blackening waves. And then the tempest strikes him; and between The lightning-bursts is seen Only a driving wreck, And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck With anguished face and flying hair Grasping the rudder hard, Still bent to make some port he knows not where, Still standing for some false, impossible shore. And sterner comes the roar Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom, And he too disappears, and comes no more.
*****
This fragment is the response to the previous excerpt from Matthew Arnold’s ‘A Summer Night’ that I blogged two days ago. As a teen in a well-regimented boarding school I found that previous fragment terrifying with its prospect of living as a bored wage-slave forever, and this second fragment exhilarating in its freedom despite the expectation of catastrophe. Altogether a very subversive poem, and I thank my schooling for including such works. For the next couple of decades I followed the wild path, failing to earn a degree at universities in three countries, never holding a job for more than 18 months, frequently moving. Eventually I found an occupation that was constantly changing, where Eliza and I were our own bosses, and that took us to dozens of countries to teach business seminars. So that successfully combined the wage-slave and the freed prisoner, and it all worked out.
Arnold originally ended his poem:
Is there no life, but these alone? Madman or slave must man be one?
But ten years later he added a much more wishy-washy piece about learning from the pure heavens and seeing what a nice life you could make for yourself. I always thought he should have stopped with the original “madman or slave” view of life: much more dramatic! But his later addition was probably justified…
Although we came in hopes to find the most amazing staging yet, the final act still filled the mind with all the trappings of regret. Although the happy lovers met with joyous singing – hers and his – we’ve seen from Carmen to Cosette how sad the ending always is.
Why do we cry for womankind, for Tosca on the parapet, for Butterfly, her love declined, for Manon and for Juliet? Haven’t we seen the sweetest pet fall victim to the wily Wiz? Haven’t we seen – from death to debt – how sad the ending always is?
The villain always lurks behind the arras, holding out the net that will entrap the golden hind, the mark of arrows ready set. At first we didn’t feel the threat; we never thought our hopes a chiz, But now we’ve learned our alphabet: How sad the ending always is!
But pour champagne, my friends, and let the golden bubbles rise and fizz! For just a moment we’ll forget how sad the ending always is.
*****
Gail White writes: “It was Barbara Loots who called my attention to the fact that the plots of many operas could end with the words “and then she dies.” Being an opera heroine is almost always fatal. My first poem on this theme was a short one, “Opera Rondeau”. Then it occurred to me that the same idea would support a ballade. Writing this was fun, as finding enough rhymes for “is” pushed me into the realm of slang. And, of course, life is indeed a process of finding happy distractions from an inevitable tragic ending.”
Gail White is a widely published Formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her new chapbook, Paper Cuts, is out on Amazon or from Kelsay Books. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats.
It’s six a.m. We’re swarming up a drain. Someone up the front knows what we’re doing. Me and Tich are flying up the flueing. Snap! My leg falls off. You can’t complain: you can’t expect an army on the trail of half a dog and sugar-sick to stop and say Oh dear, Goodbye. I squirm and flop along the gutter’s edge. A wizened snail laced up in cobwebs grins across the slime. I hear a million footsteps fading. Tich! The sun smacks like a snare-drum. Life’s a bitch. My head goes dry. I’m running out of Time. I climb a twig to face the Ant Unknown. We have to face our last few pricks alone.
*****
John Gallas writes: “Ascension: a slightly cruel Proverb to modern ears, but of course often the case as we all bustle forwards in life. The sad demise of this Ant is done in a cod-Existential drama, and tries to mix some black humour with the Final Stand (even with a leg missing). The also-once-left-behind snail a warning to us all. Who knows how Ants talk, but they are sociable, so …”
Ascension Sonnet is one of the 100 sonnets collected in The Coalville Divan (part of John Gallas’ ‘Star City’ from Carcanet), which use as their beginnings Persian Proverbs from the Wisdom of the East series by L.P. Elwell-Sutton.
John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.
We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,–
What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest, Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales, And winds and shadows fall toward the West:
And there the world’s first huge white-bearded kings In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep, And closer round their beasts the ivy clings, Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.
II And how beguile you? Death has no repose Warmer and deeper than that Orient sand Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
And now they wait and whiten peaceably, Those conquerors, those poets, those so fair: They know time comes, not only you and I, But the whole world shall whiten, here or there;
When those long caravans that cross the plain With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells Put forth no more for glory or for gain, Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells,
When the great markets by the sea shut fast All that calm Sunday that goes on and on: When even lovers find their peace at last, And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.
*****
Following on from my previous blog post on James Elroy Flecker, this is the Prologue to ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’. It has some nice lines, but the piece that contains the stirring lines that get quoted and misquoted and truncated out of context, that piece is the Epilogue, which I will post next time.
Painting by Richard-Karl Karlovič Zommer: ‘Samarkand’ (19th/ 20th century)
I remember the cold, high-ceilinged room where they had laid him, the smell of incense, brass coffin handles shining in the gloom, an aspidistra, dusty and immense.
To this small boy dressed in a mourning suit, he seemed reduced, much less than he once was: his scalp, without his cap, bald as a coot, his fingers criss-crossed on his chest like claws.
I thought back to the day we watched geese rise high over wetlands blurred with morning haze, the laughter always dancing in his eyes, his warm, familiar smell, his turn of phrase.
Life is so short while memories are long. We the bereaved are left with words unsaid. At the day’s end, he’d sing a lulling song as I rode his strong shoulders home to bed.
A prayer unbidden reached me on a whim: Preserve in me the things I loved in him.
*****
Richard Fleming writes: “This is a shortened, rhyming version of a lengthy free verse poem that I wrote over thirty years ago when I relocated to Guernsey from Northern Ireland. Like many love poems, the original version, The Hidden Traveller, has stood the test of time. This version stands as a homage to its source.”
Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his versatile work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Drawing from his Northern Irish roots and adopted home, his poetry and prose explore love, loss, nostalgia, identity, and modern life. Collections include Strange Journey (2012), held in the National Poetry Library, and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer) featuring the BBC-commissioned title poem. His work can be found on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/ or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com
Death will be harsher now, as, year by year, we solve the clues of immortality: emotions sink to animality as false hopes tighten screws of desperate fear. Hormone control will make age disappear— after false starts, most horrible to see— but those already old must beg to be frozen for the genetic engineer. While war, starvation, pipe Earth’s gruesome jigs, successful businessmen will fight to gain some dead teen’s body, to transplant their brain, the already-old beg to be guinea-pigs. Children, look back, hear our despairing cry: we bred immortals, but we had to die!
*****
I wrote this poem on 3 January 1982 – twenty years before I began to get poems published. (Formal verse was an almost absolute no-no in late 20th century magazines… although consistently taught and highly praised in schools and universities, of course.) It was finally published in Ambit in October 2007 – the magazine started and managed for 50 years by Martin Bax and the stomping ground of J.G. Ballard, Ralph Steadman, Carol Ann Duffy, etc.
In April 2018 the poem was reprinted in Bewildering Stories, an online weekly headquartered in Guelph, Ontario; and in 2024 I accepted Maryann Corbett‘s suggestion to change the title and first line and instead of “harder” use the word “harsher”… the earlier word incorrectly suggesting that we might be finding it more difficult to achieve death.
The ideas behind the poem were not new to science fiction, but were less common in formal verse. The ideas continue to inch their way towards reality; continue to be explored in popular culture (Piraro, Futurama…); and in the last 44 years I have continued to explore SF and existential themes in verse.
Our lost ones drift down a dark stream, surfacing at the brink of dream. The crack of dawn: they’re gone again. What have they left for us to keep? Night’s dialect, a coded speech beyond our reach.
Birds on the bank of a calm pond: each one is still and poised, then dives. Mornings we wake into our lives, blind to what lies beyond, below, the chasms where black rivers flow, and flickering deeper, darkly clear, that coded speech beyond our reach, words we can’t hear.
*****
Rachel Hadas has a group of sonnets appearing, one a week, in The Sonneteer. For the first she wrote: “The sonnets that will be appearing in the coming weeks weren’t conceived as a sequence. Encouraged by Ken Gordon’s enthusiasm to take a look at some of my unpublished shorter poems, I speedily found one fourteen-liner, “Tectonic Plates.” Three other poems were so close to sonnet length that they almost begged to be tweaked or tightened or gently expanded; this group includes “Out of Reach,” “Winter,” and “My Best Friend’s Mother.” In every case, the sonnetification (Ken’s helpful coinage) improved the poem. (…) I now realize that, while not conceived as a sequence, all five of these sonnets (now that they are all sonnets) do share themes. They’re about time and memory, aging and loss, what we lose and what we retain. So are many other sonnets, infinitely greater than mine. It’s a privilege to be able to join in the conversation, to swell the chorus.“
Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021), and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Form in Formless Times 