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-acquisition addict currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. His translations from Arabic, Chinese, Latin, Occitan, Ukrainian, Russian, Irish and Yiddish have appeared in sundry publications including Metamorphoses, Blue Unicorn, Asymptote, the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, and at least two people's tattos. He also writes his own poetry if things are dire enough. Most importantly, if you have a dog or even a tame fox he'd love to pet it.
