{"id":417,"date":"2012-08-21T02:31:36","date_gmt":"2012-08-21T02:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sporkpress.com\/poetry\/?p=417"},"modified":"2012-08-21T02:31:36","modified_gmt":"2012-08-21T02:31:36","slug":"2-poems-by-kerry-shawn-keys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/2012\/08\/21\/2-poems-by-kerry-shawn-keys\/","title":{"rendered":"2 Poems by Kerry Shawn Keys"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>The Seer<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We know or at least we want to know<br \/>\nthat Homer, likely, did not write down<br \/>\nhis tales, that he was blind, or at least<br \/>\nblind toward the end of his song.<br \/>\nOr was it Demodokos that did the singing.<br \/>\nI think it doesn\u2019t matter, and so this meandering<br \/>\nin order to give myself the privilege<br \/>\nof interrupting myself and asking a few things<br \/>\nabove all others that have captivated my imagination:<br \/>\nwhat was the last composition that he saw,<br \/>\nthat is, if he ever had the gift of seeing,<br \/>\nand what was the last word he might have written<br \/>\nif he had ever written a word, and above all, for this<br \/>\nwe surely cry out to know, what was the last sound<br \/>\nhe made before he died. Was it a kind of music,<br \/>\na lullaby of weeping charmed into a single phoneme,<br \/>\nor was it more like the sustained gurgle of a death-rattle<br \/>\nrising from a Hector or an Achilles battling<br \/>\nfor air in the bottomless dregs of his lungs.<\/p>\n<p>__________________________________________<\/p>\n<p><strong>Hoffers<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I know very little of the Hoffers, Helvetian half-mast ancestors.<br \/>\nI know they were mountain goats and masons and not farmers.<br \/>\nTheir mission was mortar and stone, not dung and fodder.<br \/>\nThey spoke a language heavy like stone, a marbled tongue,<br \/>\ngranite and limestone mixing guttural Bach with Palatinate,<br \/>\nDeitsch, Appalachia, jugband English and Scots.<br \/>\nI don\u2019t know much more about them other than<br \/>\nthat they were like my father, all of them orphans.<br \/>\nTheir fathers and grandfathers, also doubtless, itinerant orphans,<br \/>\npersecuted in their homeland to be rebaptized Pennsylvanian.<br \/>\nWho knows, indeed, what happened to any of them, simply gone,<br \/>\nas all of us sometime, inhabitants of a dollopy land called Oblivion.<br \/>\nThough now and then they occupy my mind, craggy phantoms<br \/>\nbuilding dry stone walls through the quicksand of my poems.<\/p>\n<p>__________________________________________<br \/>\n<strong>Kerry Shawn Keys<\/strong> is a poet, wonderscript scribbler, playwright, and scholar of the mundane. He\u2019s published dozens of poetry books, and translates from Lithuanian and Portuguese. Some of the usual prizes and awards. Keys\u2019 roots are in Appalachia, and his work derives from there, and from Brazil and India where he spent considerable time. He currently lives in Vilnius, where he is poet in residence for SLS Lithuania, and writes a column on the poets and poetry in the region for Poetry International, San Diego. His most recent book of poems is Night Flight, 2012, <strong>Presa S Press<\/strong>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Seer We know or at least we want to know that Homer, likely, did not write down his tales, that he was blind, or at least blind toward the end of his song. Or was it Demodokos that did the singing. I think it doesn\u2019t matter, and so this meandering in order to give [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-things"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}