Fury

Fury
by Gideon Burton

As heaven’s rivers overflow, cascade
in shearing cloudbursts gray as coal and cold
as wet and naked skin by wind betrayed;
a tumult of the elements grows bold
as timid earth its muddy meadows shrugs,
then coughs in thickened rivers till their seams
unweave fresh powers that with forcing tugs
uproot the oak, bring down the trusses, beams–
so I have been a passive party, mute
in elemental resignation, calm
as nature’s fractured skies or hungry brute,
as ribby children holding up a beggar’s palm.
     As weather will explode then ebbing, slow;
     the fury comes as sure as it will go.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - tab2space

Wine: A Sacramental Sonnet

This piece is a companion to the sonnet I posted last Sunday about bread.

Wine: A Sacramental Sonnet
by Gideon Burton


As human life is held in bloody flow
That pulses in its circuit, keeps us whole,
So this, our Savior's flowing life we know
As we partake the water of His soul.
Confirm, oh God, the blessing of this cup
And let our thoughts recall the solemn deed
When Jesus for our sins was offered up:
The sacramental one who bows, who bleeds!
Our spirit minds flow back to staunch each wound
That each we give unto the suffering Son;
We cannot help to ebb the Savior's swoon,
Yet hoping help, find mercy newly won.
        What's swallowed in an instant and is gone,
        Endures in hearts that holy blood makes strong.


Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - SnoShuu 

Fit for Heaven's Sports

Feeling my mortality after a week dimmed by my friend's death, I remember my faith in the renewal of our bodies.

Fit for Heaven's Sports
by Gideon Burton

With vibrant, living voice, with muscles strong
To push against the hard, ungiving earth;
With eyes to scan horizons deep and long;
With breath, alive with rhythm from our birth–
I have in restful nights upheld a hope
I know is woven in our tissues, bright,
Ascending well above the aspen slope
Of patience, thickly sound and richly light:
Our skin grown supple once again, our hair
Restored in lengthy fitness, every limb
Full ready for the day and then to spare.
Each cup of juice is filling to its brim
        My body, broken, weak and out of sorts
        Will rise with apter arms for heaven’s sports.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - rosswebsdale

My Love My Spring

It was one of those amazing Spring days in Utah today, an ironic counterpoint to the sadness of the funeral for a good man too soon gone. My wife was with me; that made all difference.  This is an imitation of Shakespeare's sonnet 29, included below.

My Love My Spring
by Gideon Burton

When circled by the burst and thaw of Spring,
and yet resisting still its warming rays,
I sift the hours, adrift in moods less clean
than joy, a derelict of tepid haze,
wishing me like those who pray and act,
pious like her, like him with faith in tact,
admiring moods this mood will not attract,
so petty with my sins and so exact;
Yet pushing past this vast and thin contempt,
upward glancing, facing to the east,
my hands entwine with hers whose warmth's unspent;
my little meal's transformed into a feast.
   For when I'm low and turn toward my wife,
   the failing fails, and living turns to life.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: Luann Hawker, WholeGrainPhotography.net

Sonnet 29
by William Shakespeare


When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Warm Spring

Warm Spring
by Gideon Burton


Warm Spring, how many blades of green obey
Your gentle living summons? Tell what gray
And vacant cindered trunks revive in May,
Their sapling strength no longer to betray?
Fresh season, meeting Winter’s tight command;
Persuasion milky warm and rich in spice.
But could you, waking me, bring living twice?
How can the sickened soul in stubble stay
As though the hoarfrost were a funeral shroud?
Will April's God rest sleeping as I pray?
And all Decembers cling and clog and crowd?
     The earth will tilt and life pours headlong in
     I seek the sun, though pale and wearied thin.




Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - MightyBoyBrian

Rockets

Rockets
by Gideon Burton

The airy tissue of the island clouds
unweaves, collides, then weaves itself again
until an erring kite or plane unshrouds
the azure arch of afternoon, dark span
of thickest oxygen that bleeds into
the black escape of emptiness and time,
beyond the curve of indigo and blue.
The rockets, metal-girded, eager, primed
to pierce both atmospheres and ignorance
attack the waiting sky with trailing flame,
igniting some small part of earth, their chance
to measure sunbeams, or give stars their names.
     A ribbon girds our planet, tightly held,
     yet some escape, like roaring redwoods felled.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - colinjcampbell.

Mourning

Mourning
by Gideon Burton

Severe with clotting time, the hours limp

uneven. The ragged mesh of grief

constricts in webbing layers. Pressures crimp

and bind, directionless and blind. A steep

crevasse engulfs and swallows, rough with black

and icy bouldered walls. A grizzled foam,

pollutants heavy in its vaporing cracks,

pours in its choking mass of poisoned loam.

A time is fixed to our arrival, days

to count as child and spirit meld their breath.

But time unhinges, lost within a maze,

when soul from body's ripped in sudden death.

     The time is out of joint and bent askew,

     its weight outweighed in weighing days too few.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - Southside Images

On the Passing of a Friend

Today I was stunned, deeply, to learn of the passing of a friend and fellow professor, Gary Hatch, whom I have known close to 30 years. He was only 46. A pulmonary embolism took his life suddenly last Saturday. It is eerie to me that on that very day I was researching embolisms and other pulmonary problems as I was writing another sonnet. The casual tone of that poem is far from my feelings today. Gary and I shared many interests, and I deeply respected the way he conducted his life with so much enthusiasm, kindness, and interest in the well-being of others. Thank you, Gary. We won't forget.

in memory of Gary Hatch (pictured here with his wife, AnneMarie)

On the Passing of a Friend
by Gideon Burton

We live our lives with confidence that some
are living better. You were one of these
for us, alive to books and language, done
with lesser things, with better things more pleased;
a man of curiosity who shared
enthusiasms freely with us all,
whose even-tempered spirit never flared,
but steadied many far more apt to fall.
Somehow you stayed untouched by all the death
in life, untroubled by uncertainty,
devoting freely hand and heart and breath
to neighbor, colleague, student, family.
     We mourn and wonder, prizing fresh your time,
     while through the skies your gentle spirit climbs.

Bread: A Sacramental Sonnet

Bread: A Sacramental Sonnet

by Gideon Burton

O God, Eternal Father, in the name

Of Jesus Christ, thy slain and risen Son--

That we who, heavy laden, full of blame

May through His spirit find our woes undone;

Recalling His weak body, frail as ours,

That long before Golgotha's final trial

Had passions known, disease, fatiguing hours,

The strains all human flesh must know awhile;

That we His name may take into our lives

As emptied Jesus did His father's breath;

That He, His words obeyed, may us revive

As His commands insure our souls from death–

        Bless, we pray, this sweet and saving bread,

        For we shall live who but for Him were dead.

This is an imitation/paraphrase of the prayer offered during the sacrament (eucharist) ordinance of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The original text can be found here.  Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - six steps

Interpreting Chest X-rays

So, I received notice about a new book just out on the subject of interpreting chest X-rays. This ad was academic publisher spam. I'm in the humanities, for crying out loud! And yet, the cover of the book intrigued me aesthetically. It isn't often that you see orange and mauve backlighting the rib cage.:

It turns out there is a whole cottage industry of X-ray art. I love when science and art collide. This is why I'm so interested by information aesthetics and data art. But this book interested me for another reason. As an English professor I've been in the interpretation business for a long time. I wondered, what are the hermeneutical hurdles of other fields? And with something as inherently, literally fuzzy as X-rays, could I find in radiology a kinship with the anxieties of analysis that fuel so many discussions of art and literature? So I glanced at the table of contents.

And there it was, listed under Chapter 7 (on lung tumours), shining like a pearl swept up onto the sand by a friendly tide: "The solitary pulmonary nodule." Now, that might mean nothing to you (and semantically, it certainly meant nothing to me); but for someone who has a keen eye out for found pentameters (examples of iambic pentameter occurring unconsciously in the wild), this was pay dirt. Can you just hear that rhythm? Who cares what it means? That rhythm just sings: "the SOL i TAR y PUL mon AR y NOD ule." Now, purists will note that there is an extra, 11th syllable, unaccented at the end of the line. But that only paves the way for a feminine rhyme (...I'm thinking, "module"?) and has been perfectly acceptable in sonnets (Shakespeare's sonnet #20 is silly with them)

Well, when one is writing a sonnet a day, a found pentameter is pretty much akin to a sign from the heavens. That's when I knew that I must explore the dark art of X-ray interpretation for my sonnet today.  (The image that follows is a chest X-ray that I overlapped with a Rorschach ink blot image to try to suggest the mystery of this sort of interpretation.)

Interpreting Chest X-rays
by Gideon Burton

Ignore the ribs, the diaphragm, the spine--
they orient our looking but distract.
Assess the lung expansion, any line
across the lobes? One part may have collapsed.
Now look for masses, lesions, cavities
for pleural thickening or asthma's signs.
Has emphysema left no travesties?
That does not set aside pneumonia's kind.
No diagonistic radiographer,
I hesitate with certainty to say,
but technically one is the soul's biographer
who tells the tales unveiled in chest X-rays.
     A solitary pulmonary nodule?
     Perhaps, but science darkly blurs its modules.
    
Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship.