Yet do thy worst, old Time, despite thy wrong.
There is a dignity one might not see,
the lady of situations,
of the mother hidden,
the height of our portentious neighbor we never knew.
Her face was gone, and it mattered, somehow,
like a growth that I sliced off like a melanoma,
quivering to the end,
like a crinoline grotesque,
wondering where the good luck went.
Now mourn, and if sad share with us to bear,
face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher.
How dull it is to pause to make an end.
The present is always dark.
A cento is a poem or other literary work composed of parts or lines of other works. This cento is just for fun and my first attempt at a patchwork of lines that could lead to a little laughter--or disgust! My thanks to X.P. Callahan (Diary Poems) for supplying a list of wonderful poems in her recent (serious) cento, "One More Heinous Crime." Enjoy hers and the source poems in their entirety! https://substack.com/home/post/p-147717795?r=3myco9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Poems are listed in the order of the lines above: William Shakespeare, Sonnet 19 Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Interim” T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” Dylan Thomas, “Vision and Prayer” Emily Dickinson, “Facts by Our Side Are Never Sudden” Nick Flynn, “You Asked How” Anne Sexton, “The Break Away” William Stafford, “Boom Town” Ogden Nash, “A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor” Charles Bukowski, “I Made a Mistake” John Milton, “Upon the Circumcision” Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 22 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses” Mark Strand, “Black Maps"
Thanks for introducing me to cento, Carole.
Cool. You used the same poems, but different lines and in a different order?