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    Current Issue boat in the air
    artwork of a red leaves
    Plough Quarterly 30: Made Perfect: Ability and Disability Poetry

    Poem: “So Trued to a Roar”

    By Christian Wiman

    November 30, 2021
    2 Comments
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    • Patricia Hawkes

      My Part Under the oak tree I’m as still as a needle when a record plays I listen enrapt the whole is world turning and each moment displays a constant joining of countless journeys in wondrous ways together working with each mite a note in a fuller phrase so helping to lead the whole movement onwards with me serving to raise this breathtaking symphony to heights sublime through awe and praise. pah

    • Michael Kozubek

      All three present great spiritual presence and turn of phrase. Revealing again that a good poem need not be long. I like this one the best.

    So trued to a roar,
    so accustomed to a grimace
    of against, I hardly noticed
    it was over.

    Like an invalid I crept
    out into the open
    (since when was there an open?)
    and like a revenant lipped

    the names of things
    turned things again:
    white pine, quaking aspen,
    shagbark that by all rights

    should have been shorn.
    Was it for this, I asked
    (since when was there someone to ask?)
    that I was born?

    No answer, unless of leaves
    acquiring light, and small lives
    going about their business
    of being less,

    and on the clear pond
    (and in the clearer beyond)
    the mien of a man
    unraptured back to man.

     

    artwork of a red leaves

    Eyvind Earle, Red Leaves © 2021 Eyvind Earle Publishing. Used by permission.

    Contributed By ChristianWiman Christian Wiman

    Christian Wiman is a distinguished American poet and former editor of Poetry magazine.

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    2 Comments
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