Jul 22, 2020 | Gus Stevens, Quatrains, Rhymed Couplets
Even as we all are hurtling apart, following diverging vectors, there is comfort in the circling. Even our anchoring sun, who hectors the planets, orbits in a greater sky. We all circle and are circled by. We seek the very center that we fly from— the power that both...
May 11, 2019 | Gus Stevens, Rhymed Couplets, Spring
They say to write what you know, but what if there is nothing left to show? Nothing to paint but green on green, and all there is to see—already seen. No fresh petals curl up from the dirt, and meaning hangs like an ill-fitting shirt: stretched and shrunken, thin and...
Nov 23, 2018 | Gus Stevens, Humor, Rhymed Couplets, Winter
This dull and wintry day is still a weeping grey. But with the turning of a dial perhaps I’ll force a smile by conjuring the warmth of June against this gloomy afternoon. Like a bored cat, I linger. I boil water with my finger. Yet, despite this warlock power, I...
Jul 23, 2018 | Gus Stevens, Hexameter, Pentameter, Rhymed Couplets, Summer
Why are my poems so obsessed with doom? Is there no light their dark will not consume, no work they will not turn into a chore, nor child they cannot drown in metaphor? Sometimes beauty is neither fraud nor thief; sometimes a leaf is just a common leaf— a welcome...
Aug 24, 2017 | Autumn, Gus Stevens, Rhymed Couplets
The thorn branches are a knot of tangled capillaries. They quarter armies of spiders standing silent and sentinel over the blackest of the blackberries– the last and heaviest summer sweet before the coming rot. These are the scouts and outriders of the advancing...
Mar 28, 2017 | Grief, Rhymed Couplets, The Work of Greater Minds
After great pain, a formal feeling comes – The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’ And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’? The Feet, mechanical, go round – A Wooden way Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – Regardless grown, A...
