BROWSE Columns
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Poems cannot be.
Not unless they mean something.
No sun of night can be
a star without the humans out
to think
they are, and what but language leaves
green leaves
leaf-green? Go hear a poem
scanned out on the screen or pages
through the I of the beholder, listen
at commas, whitespace
and what's smoldering
between linebreaks, puns spelled
to be scene and....see
the eye's both camera
in action, and dark room
for the real that others bring.
Picture a perfect sphere
called satisfaction of hollow spacetime.
Really, anything you want
to see a poem do,
it does, like free verse
that you thought this sonnet was.
A. Z. Foreman is a literary translator, poet and language teacher currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. He received his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. in Arabic Language from the University of Maryland. His translations from Latin, Arabic, Chinese, Old Irish, Occitan, Russian, Old English, Ukrainian and Yiddish have appeared in sundry anthologies, journals and a BBC radio broadcast. He sometimes writes his own poetry if it really comes to that. He divides his time between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have a dog, he would very much like to pet it.
