Share This Poem: “1911,” by Ron Smith.
BROAD STREET invites you to enjoy this poem from our “Maps & Legends” issue. It’s presented here as a broadside to download and print out — or you can scroll past and read the whole poem in plain text (though you’ll miss out on special indentations, alas).
1911
A stone fell from the sky into Egypt,
(killed a dog),Cubism into the language,
Madox Ford onto the floor, rolling . . .
*
Marinetti slapped a London gent
with a fine Italian glove.
Rome unveiled its wedding cake,
*
Richmond a school on Grove
for gentlemen, scholars.
Hundreds of words for snow
*
fell on the baffled Eskimo,
Edward Weston’s Tropico stretched
under the palms, and Rorschach
*
smeared suggestive shapes we
all pretended not to see,
Tolsoy had his first year being
*
dead, Cavafy sailed off
in all directions, Yeats moved
upon the shadowy waters . . .
*
Hubert Humphrey saw the light,
Mahler, Gilbert, Pulitzer the dark,
George Moore lugged his crystal ideals
*
off to Cambridge . . . Portugal pulled
the plug on the One True Church, and
China killed already dead Confucius
*
just as FDR entered the NY Senate.
They just kept coming, trochees tumbling:
Ronald Reagan, William Golding, bawling
*
babies, pure potential! Not to mention
a star fell in Egypt, killed a dog,
and the world began anew.
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Ron Smith recently served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia, and he is the Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond.
His books are Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, Moon Road, Its Ghostly Workshop, and The Humility of the Brutes.
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