Category: Altered Poems

collage
5 x 6 3/8 inches

Dark-draped
dreamed the boat that bore
the fading sun
to the starlight shore

collage
5 x 6 3/8 inches

Count two in tracing
the raptured line
Of childhood’s faith
this is the shrine

collage
5 x 6 3/8 inches

Bright and reckless
sound the sorrowing bells
Till the threads of being
shot swift from soul to soul

collage
5 x 6 3/8 inches

A song, a prayer,
A fleeting vow,
Fond memories gather
As I bow.

This is the first in another alphabet book of reworked poems by my very favorite Very Bad Poet, Wallace Bruce.

As promised, a day late, but finally and truly finished at last. The full set can be found here. All the text was taken from Wallace Bruce’s Wanderers, a book of very, very, very bad Victorian poetry.

You smile at the story,
you call it absurd —
That far-away evening in June
disturbed
Carved deep in the stone
like a rune
I have heard,
True to the letter, and every word.

Zodiacal light lingering bright,
Up which the white-winged angels fly
Mercy and hope in the starlit sky.

What of the voyage
and what of the night?
Serenely sleeping
in soft moonlight
and their hearts grew calm
as the waters bright

X and Y
What shall they do
When stranger than legend
and fiction is truth?

Strange phantoms taught
of that remorseless date
A tale that a mother
might sing to her babe

To anchor at last
in the Harbor of Dreams
A land of love
where memory sleeps.

Ulysses-like
from the misty deep,
While over the wake
the shadows sleep

Vision or dream, prophetic still
Of all the land wherein we dwell
Older hears are waiting
still

Pin-cushioned dolls
white with snow
Where are the wanderers
years ago?

Questions never fully answered
Cold comfort
for the weary head

Returning across the horizon blue
Is this the ship our fathers knew?

Moonlight floods
like liquid leaven
The stars in their courses
nearer heaven

No annal like this
through all history’s range
The warp and the woof
of the chronicle strange

O, how the Pleiades would stare
In one heart shall their melody share
For I played in my childhood there

Just the same forevermore,
On the moonlit rock
by the silent shore

Known to the living
voice of the deep
Say, whose was the spirit
embodied in thee?

Lost in the wild woods
—dark and deep—
Look at the same round moon
with me