Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Once I found it in nature (Cento)

Once I found it in nature

beyond morning glories,
all caught up in the cornstalks.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky
indifferent to all that it lacks:

a swaying creeper outside a half-open window
seeking after that sweet golden clime

in a dream,
in the yellow of sunflowers
fantastically far from real.

To what do we owe this
forgetting not to kiss?

The easy eye of the sun, now
blessed by our own.

_______________________________

This is a cento; its lines or parts of lines are, in order, from the following:

Frank Steele "Sunflower"
Mary Oliver "Morning Glories"
Allen Ginsberg "Sunflower Sutra"
Meghan O'Rourke "Inventing a Horse"
Fernando Pessoa "The Book of Disquiet"
William Blake "Ah! Sun-Flower"
Dale Sprowl "Aqua Vita"
David Allen Evans "Girl Riding a Horse in a Field of Sunflowers"
Dale Sprowl "Aqua Vita"
Graham Foust "From a Finished Basement"
Graham Foust "From a Finished Basement"
Aracelis Girmey "St. Elizabeth"
Allen Ginsberg "Sunflower Sutra"

Capitalization and punctuation are my own.

4 comments:

drew said...

I love making centos, and yours in inspired!

Peggy Rosenthal said...

What fun it must have been to put this poem together! All those disparate poem-sources, yet you've made them your own. Love it.

injaynesworld said...

How beautiful and wonderfully inventive!

Anonymous said...

'...to what do we owe this forgetting not to kiss,' is the tie that binds this centos to my heart