Welcome, blog readers, to another installment of our Pick-a-Poem feature! This week, as we do every week, we have chosen a poem to feature here on the blog. Consider this your mid-week poetry break. These poems all come from Poetry Daily, this very handy resource that features a new poem every single day. This week we’re featuring Glorious Particles in the Atmosphere Aflame by Dean Young.
According to his bio page, Dean Young is the author of eleven books of poetry. Those publications include finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he is currently the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas Austin.
Glorious Particles in the Atmosphere Aflame by Dean Young
My dog loves being airborne.
She leaps over the coffee table onto the couch.
Never will we be sealed in the necropolis again.
Leaps when she infers a biscuit.
A walk. A piece of crystal broken off
from the original idea of light.
Then she gets introspective and lies on the rug.
We’re surrounded by books and in each a poet
holds the sun in some sort of basket
then his or her skull starts to glow.
One more minaret to the mind.
When my dog misses her puppies,
she gets the walrus from the toy box
and finishes ripping its white fluffy guts out.
Look, she says, snow. Even my dog
is more creative than me
although I make a wicked margarita.
The secret is capsicum.
The secret is drinking from a test tube.
Something’s just exploded in outer space
but don’t worry, by the time it reaches us
we’ll long be ash by other means.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s featured poem! For more posts like this one, click here.
— Jet Fuel Blog Editor, Mary Egan
