This week's Next Line, Please takes you for a spin around the world. The places are real and the experiences imagined, and yet there's something about this prompt that makes me feel like a tired, excited traveller on a midnight train heading to…
“Montevideo” by Angela Ball
Montevideo mourns in spangles tonight.
In the middle of somewhere, wives fly aprons
from housetops, sit down equally
with husbands wives sons daughters,
beautifully and remorselessly thinking
in the moist old city. Montevideoin the middle of somewhere
renounces Brutalism in buildings
and roughness of action, endorses
la Dama de la Noche and the shyest
parrots. Lost to stables, roans and chestnuts
circle extravagance. In the middle
of somewhere, Montevideo mourns
in spangles tonight.
…and the wind is whipping and the tourists are buzzing, and as we pull into the following stop on the midnight express train:
Ricky Ray’s “Hawaii”:
The pool blue of Hawaii
haunts me like
the eye of a dog
whose other eye was brown
like the skin
of my father
all day swinging a machete
in the sun,I want the ungodly
way the women
would watch him work
through his troubles
to feed me,
fat boy who ate too much
because a dog was his mother
and both of them ate the sun.
And so many more! Including un-Finn-ished poems and many more stories from places visited in the imagination.
For next week … how about a poem of twelve to 14 lines, beginning with a one-sentence summary of War and Peace:
“Pierre loves Natasha and Napoleon invades Russia.”
As David Lehman smartly remarks, "The two clauses are perfectly balanced, each one a subject, verb, and object, and the incongruity between the two clauses is very funny."
Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post from around the world, and enter your candidate for next week!