We Who Are Young

By Robert Dickerson

Some of the poems in this volume may be found mediocre, others, less so. Some are more recent; some still less so, if you favor that sort of thingstanza poetry that rhymes and is oblivious of political currents. I happily publish them all. Assembled without regard for composition date, they can be viewed, for better and worse, as mature poems. The same indifference may account for their unevenness. This being my third collection, these pieces can, in some respects, be considered leftovers.

They needed to be published to bring to closure the sensibility that formed them. Its not the sort of sensibility you can carry into older age. If this sounds like abandonment, it isnt. I mean to continue tweaking the muse, but from a different angle.

Youth is the best time, and the concerns of youth are the most poetical. That season and its concerns are represented by the poems in this volume. May we grow as we go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543423242

Robert Dickerson

Robert Dickerson has crafted poetry for some forty years and by his own admission, is ‘not exactly a beginner.’ His pen has produced several volumes-worth of verse. He celebrates the ‘formal’ and cultivates the ‘science’ of poetry, though he believes the degree of spiritual refi nement in the voice distinguishes the poet. His poems revel in the concrete and he believes in the poem as object. He advocates a natural voice, the primacy of the idea and the translation of the ordinary. His ethic insists that, mathematics aside, all that passes for truth in human affairs is rooted in need and tribal belief. He welcomes the return to poetry of transparency and design and prefers a poetic of mood and word magic to a poetry of politics. In his view, a poem is a ‘joke’ whose punch-line yields enlightenment. He avoids the ‘confessional’ mode as being ‘too full of itself ’. To learn the craft of poetry he recommends practice and constant alertness to poetic possibility. He also recommends reading the greats.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Robert Dickerson.

Library of Congress Control Number:         2017907665

ISBN:                        Hardcover                  978-1-5434-2322-8

                                   Softcover                    978-1-5434-2323-5

                       eBook                         978-1-5434-2324-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 07/18/2017

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Contents

Preface

Dedication

Mice

Dafni

Triple Haiku

Sleeping Dreams

You Say No, But …

To Each Their Own

New Year Song

Shelling

Paul in Tarsus

Congratulations Minuet

Stress

The Greedy Old Man

Spring Came to Old Fourteenth Street

AM Inspection

Landor

Catch

Mars the God

Holderlin

Willow

Flu

I Simply Can’t Forget You

To an Ancient Coin

Bloom

Bug

Chelsea Ramble

Penelope

In the Morning Fair …

Delusions

She Knows

Shower

Maybe Because …

Advice

Face

Sicilian Shower

Old and Young

Fishes

Then and Now

Canarini

It Was a River …

Valse

Like Music

Hoplite Song

Anzio

Aubade

Bedtime Story

Leopard

Green

Florent

Midsummer

Behind the Waterfall

Die-Hard Summer of ’94

Out

Romans

It Is Better …

Urbino

Song (1987)

Birds

Like a Hurricane

After a Great Storm

The Sun Has Come Out to Play

Owl Children

Bowerbird

Fly

Aria

Matthew 19:20

Auden’s Slippers

Interlude

Barrio

The Blinding of Polyphemus

Lament

2 AM Lullaby

A Charm

A Realistic Love Poem from Middle Age

Poem

Spider

Fly

Birthday

Cicada

Nature

Mood

Spring

Dip, Oars, Rise

Preface

This collection is offered more as an archive than from any sense of its literary merit. We hope they will be read in that light.

RD

Dedication

By this pylon Aurelius

acquits his solemn vow

to shining Helios

clement and invincible.

Mice

I have seen them and heard them

Scurrying across the floor

And in the corners

By night—the lonely foraging they do:

Frightening to a poor

Solitary sleeper and dream reaper.

But they must eat too.

So long as they’re mice

And not their heftier kin

Who rarely, I’m told, climb to heights

I can abide them then

And with them share my larder and my floor:

All of us are poor,

And these can make their feast upon my crumb.

I could get a Burma cat—

Good mousers, all know that—

Or a hydrocollator;

I could set a trap, ah, so—

But why do that?

To hear the snap before the squeal of woe

Would darken my dreams—no.

No way! A trap’s too easy.

Could not a trap be set for me?

Neatly baited for whoever’s sake

When all they wanted was