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The Poetry of Dr.
Glenn Swetman
***** SEARCHING THROUGH POEMS OF
FORMER STUDENTS
by Dr. Glenn Swetman
Years ago they wrote these, when they were young,
before the apple or the bullet or the dust,
before they were disunioned from their dreams
that they could Cauldron truth from earnest tries.
They hoped the pastures would bleed into the cities
that green would leak through every concrete dike
the way that sunrise slops acrOSS horizons,
the way a blush heats up the unseen night.
They saw the mass of man as noble kin,
each gleamIng like a single cell of plankton
and lighting the multItudinous seas
in every other color--but not blood.
Excluding themselves from the rancid air
they smelled what was the truth of self-conviction,
thinking that they had burned In last year's smoke
the sticky fingered innocence of childhood.
But the pseudopod of the city limits
eases over' the next hill. It stretches
like an echidna's tongue-~stlcky and red,
ropy and sweet, and faster than rainbows.
None of the images fit. They are lIke
peanut-butter-fingered babies trying
to cram two jigsaw puzzles into one-
sincere, original, bold, and foredoomed.
And so they were--fantastic, impotent,
smooth in empty evenings as an early moon.
like daylight falling stars that shoot across
the sun's bland face. I must create a myth.
"Beneath the whitest snow, white lillies bloom.
They spread white lacey fronds beneath the snow,
And when the snow expires with the sun,
they melt. Their blooms have bloomed for me alone."
*****
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