by Joanne De Simone Reynolds
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| Detail from “Morning Has Broken” (Oil and Acrylic on Canvas) by Brad Gray, 2017 |
I was despairing at 4 am—
I wrote the poem and sent it off . . .
I didn’t choose the illustration
Though I knew it was fitting a bit of a shock the bird a blue bird—something
Lifted—
My father didn’t serve in WWII
For freedom from dominance and division
For me to abandon the principle
The impulse—
That he passed away 22 years ago today on a Veterans Weekend is fitting—
What dawned in me this morning is what someone once called something like
Irregular reversal subversion—
What a morning like this one (not unlike the lines I wrote before these lines) calls forth or for
As if from a haunting (fathers poets birds)—
Joanne De Simone Reynolds is grateful to The New Verse News. This poem was written in response to her own poem published on the site on 11/9/2024. The words irregular, reversal, and subversion are taken from a letter William Carlos Williams wrote to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, in 1913.