Norman Ball
is a Virginia-based poet writer, poet, and musician whose light verse has appeared in Light Quarterly, The Raintown Review, Folly and Melic Review.
Recently his sonnet Thornery was a finalist in the Prairie Home Companion Love Sonnet contest.
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Fart of Larkness
The river’s now a bric a brac display
of styrofoam resigned to island floe.
The tires, once fitting transport, sink below
the time they pulled their weight at union pay.
I walk on water here. The virtue’s not
my own. To garbage, credit’s rightly due.
Hopping from log to fridge to empty spot,
I skip the bridge whose girders look askew.
I used to set my watch to ripples. Now
I point upstream unmoved and overdue
as currents, thick with hubris, can’t allow
the notion of a river running through.
Given this stuck conveyor caked in slime,
the question seems both timely and sublime:
With hearts and rivers bogged in goop and grime,
how then—today—would Conrad tell the time?
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