Get Your Premium Membership

Read Quintains Poems Online

NextLast
 

Quintains For Claude Raines

I’ve never been to Sicily, and yet
it’s always felt a part of me.  Who knows?
Another life, another alphabet?
Alongside Archimedes, jotting prose
in Agrigentum I, with each vignette,

imbibing wine, as bitter as regret,
harangued the hellene farmers, stoning crows.
That Greek me – did I tend (as now) to get
frustrated when my verse was ‘on the nose’,
all too transparently in Homer’s debt?

But Italy’s a credible coquette,
more winning in her ways than we suppose.
Like Rhapsody in Blue’s smooth clarinet,
she captures us.  We victims, in love’s throes,
admire her steely claws, as black as jet.


Written  October 11, 2022

Copyright © Michael Coy

NextLast



Book: Reflection on the Important Things