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Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems. We pair poets with poets and they write a sequence of six new works by responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems here
 

Walking with Monica and Augustine


Once I was exactly the age I am now;
        I walked in a stone square
        and stopped in astonishment.

Flags, chained bicycles, humans, statues, all
        at the whim of what one might call
        an "idiot god".

I said to the seminary students
        who walked with me, This is mistaken.
        Nothing strange or sublime is on
        the face of this, and nothing is
        behind it, and I had their pity,
        which was a delicate hate.

A woman caught her son,
        who'd jumped off a little obelisk,
        then nothing was not strange again.

What is ineffable gets muffled when you say it
        to another student of it, each word
        buried in the next word's shroud,
        so we departed without comment.

We hoped the sound and texture
        of a light directed through the shrouds
        were not too far corrupted.

Anyway true, my grandchildren are building
        a machine, an idiot, but
        the god will teach itself to learn.

The particles of light that are
        the stones of its abacus brain
        align in their dimensions,
        until what was ineffable is
        as plain a simulation as a stone
        square, so I stopped there.