This week’s Badgerblog selection combines imagery and rhythm to create an ominous effect. With each phrase and line of the poem, the picture in the reader’s mind expands and darkens, leading us to the final line—one we’ve all heard before but which appears again with new weight, threatening to undo us all. Congratulations to Leyla on a gorgeous poem!
Untitled
Carpet stapled onto a ladder, stapled
onto a roof, like elongated shingles,
A rainbow of windows casting a shadow,
like a painting,
like a painting,like stained glass in weathering
windowpanes, on top of the invisible house,
held up by a shipmast, a cement block,
a bedpost and a slithery wooden foot,
held up by a painted fist
on top of a wooden sign: “Those who do not
remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Leyla, twelfth grade, Badgerdog Creative Writing Summer Camp
To see a photo of Paradise Now! (The Salvage) by Matthew Day Jackson from the Blanton Museum of Art, which inspired this poem, click here.
