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(untitled)
Beneath the buildings of a metropolis
with their hard shells of mirroring glass and steel,
when all else fails, then somewhere there's you:
you and your hidden real life, to us known
just as a super man, with a sense of what's
right far beyond those of us mere mortal men--
when we can't deal with our bad guys,
you are our conscience and Law's sure long arm
and show us not just what an ideal can be
but also how we fail to improve because,
with you, we needn't try, not too hard,
knowing that you will, again, reprieve us
from our mistakes, unlooked for but counted on
like gravity or love in the spring: a child-
like faith in how our parents catch us
stumbling about on the sidewalk--yes, you
enable us, our savior, but don't go yet:
your story's beacon guides us to what we must
become when we grow up, when we'll live
justice as though it was bound in our bones.
Wonder of wonders, an actual genre poem.
---L.
with their hard shells of mirroring glass and steel,
when all else fails, then somewhere there's you:
you and your hidden real life, to us known
just as a super man, with a sense of what's
right far beyond those of us mere mortal men--
when we can't deal with our bad guys,
you are our conscience and Law's sure long arm
and show us not just what an ideal can be
but also how we fail to improve because,
with you, we needn't try, not too hard,
knowing that you will, again, reprieve us
from our mistakes, unlooked for but counted on
like gravity or love in the spring: a child-
like faith in how our parents catch us
stumbling about on the sidewalk--yes, you
enable us, our savior, but don't go yet:
your story's beacon guides us to what we must
become when we grow up, when we'll live
justice as though it was bound in our bones.
—2 September 2001, 21 September 2009
A few hours after posting the fragment, I figured out how to write the rest. I'm not entirely happy with the last stanza: to balance the structure it probably should be unpacked into two, if I can find an image worth the words, and in any case "beacon" is a bit trite and expected. No title has attached itself yet -- the best candidate so far is "Heroism", meh. But I'm really liking the form, with a meter that's just irregular enough to approach speech rhythms but still strict enough to enforce heightening the language towards poetry.Wonder of wonders, an actual genre poem.
---L.