Saturday, March 20, 2010

My own bad poetry...

I've been at the Sigma Tau Delta convention in St. Louis this week/week-end, and I've listened to lots and lots of fabulous student papers, and amazing writers, but I've been inspired by one paper to write a  poem myself. I'm sure it stinks to high heaven, because I'm a linguist, not a poet.

Twenty-seven volumes line the shelves,
covered in dust ripe with mold, mildewed in their neglect
redolent of the sweat of Scotsmen, Londoners, and colonials.
Once, James, Frederick, and Ronald argued that dwarves
mined out the soil, while the 
dwarfs labored to bejewel 
Snow White's crystalline coffin.
Twenty-seven volumes line the shelves,
awaiting undergraduate violence
perpetrated with simple-minded fingers
mining their onionskin pages,
scratching at pieces and parts, erasing histories,
flattening with timelines with over-painted or dirtied
fingernails; rhetorical blowtorches burn away
millennia of etymons, scorch the earth
beneath the feet of Saxons,
Romans, and Iberians. Oh, alas, how I sorrow for thee, 
misused omnibus of transcendent words.