Oh no, Godot!
So slow to show.
Who knows how low
two fools won’t go
to hold off sorrow?
How cold, how wrong
to con or ghost
hobos who long
for comfort most.
So go tomorrow.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “For its ‘Moon’ issue, Ecotone put out a call for submissions in the rarer French repeating forms and suggested that one way to evoke the moon was by using the word O or words in which a lot of o’s appeared. I wanted to write a rondelet using words whose only vowel was o, which made sense because the subject was the moon. Therefore, I made a list of as many words as I could think of that used no vowel but o, looking particularly for words that rhymed with one another. Luckily, that vowel can be used to represent many different sounds. I wrote a rondelet called “Solo” that later appeared in the journal.
I had heard of Christian Bök’s Eunoia, a collection in which each poem uses a single vowel, and I later learned from Pedro Poitevin that it is called “univocalic verse.” I had many words left over from my search for o-words, one of which was “Godot.” I have always been a huge fan of drama, and I attended and read many plays in my youth, when Theatre of the Absurd was still in vogue. But some of my most boring and irritating theatre experiences were at plays by Samuel Beckett. I decided to write a poem that was my critique of the premise of Waiting for Godot. The poem first appeared in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

“Waiting for Godot” by UMTAD is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.