Tag Archives: Poetry Foundation

The Concert Goers – I Fib You Not!

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Below is a “Fib” – shorthand for a Fibonacci – explained HERE on The Poetry Foundation website.

The number of syllables in each line of the “The Concert Goers” should be 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34. Unfortunately this blog post does not permit the 34 syllable line to be read as a single line. Let your eyes do the trick of combining the last two lines into one.

The Concert Goers

O
the
joyful
harmonies
whose orchestras and
choristers draw longing, lonely
specks of stardust to the hall to join as one to hear
the yet-to-be-voiced dots and lines and signs played and sung by drums, piano,
clarinets, piccolos, triangle, timpani, trumpets, sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses to the magic of the Maestro’s baton!

 – Gordon C. Stewart, Feb. 4, 2015

Lake Murray Symphony Orchestra

Lake Murray Symphony Orchestra

Solitude

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Steve Shoemaker wrote this lovely verse after reading Alexander Pope’s Ode on Solitude.

On Reading “Solitude,” written at age 12 by Alexander Pope.

In our time of celebrity
adulation, we all want fame.
To die unknown, not on TV,
will bring us shame.

Pope seems to love obscurity,
yet he is known 300 years
later for his great poetry.
I write with tears

my words will not ever be read
except on FaceBook by 10 friends.
No one will know me when I’m dead:
pride even ends.

 

– Steve Shoemaker, July 15, 2014

Editor’s Note: Steve’s verse arrives two weeks after his first cataract surgery and the morning after my latest hearing test. His eyesight is better than it’s been since he was eight, but he has no illusions of a return to the tender years when life lay all ahead waiting to unfold. Unlike Steve’s corrected eyesight, my hearing will not get better; it moves me ever deeper into silence and solitude, a gentle sort of preparation for the acceptance of death (obscurity) when there is no pride.

That Alexander Pope could write this at the age of 12 is astonishing. I’m going back to the Poetry Foundation for more of him, but today I’ll feast on Steve’s reading of him and the first stanza of Pope’s Ode to Solitude:

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Click the link above (Ode on Solitude) for Pope’s poem on the site of The Poetry Foundation.

Thanks for coming by!

Gordon and Steve