How Long the Years Grow
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
like strings of broken lyres.
Again, when have I ever not loved?
I summon you now,
the happy genius of my household,
from a kingdom that bullies, and hectors, and swears.
And within the pane-lit windows,
the ghosts swarm.
Skin remembers how long the years grow.
Let’s ask a poet with no way of knowing:
Did I have to be born?
With many, many thanks to the following poets:
William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Derek Walcott, May Sarton, William Carlos Williams, Philip Freneau, Bill Knott, Rae Armantrout, Naomi Shihab Nye, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Mattathias (as translated by David Rosenberg).
OK, putting in the links took longer than writing the poem …
A cento is a poem made entirely of lines borrowed from other poems. For mine, I went to poets.org and navigated to their index of poems appropriate for various holidays. I grabbed a line from one poem for each holiday listed there. I did this mostly in order, except that I flipped Chanukah and Christmas because the line I found for Chanukah was an especially killer ending, and I just didn’t like the poem as much without the flip in the last two lines. I also made a few changes to punctuation and such, where needed for sense.
I had fun with this. Was it … cento-riffic? Maybe. Maybe it was.
Oh, and also, P.S.: I forgot to say thank you, thank you here to Vince Gotera for featuring one of my poems from a few days back, on his blog, The Man with the Blue Guitar. I was honored and thrilled, and you should visit him posthaste!
Marilyn Rauch Cavicchia 
Nicely done. I shall have to try this one. 🙂
Thanks! I’ve been enjoying trying all these different forms. That’s not something I’d done much before.
Marilyn and Dave, I’m so glad to see you’ve met. I know you’ll enjoy each other’s work!
That was fun. The lines seem to go togeher well and I like the concluding question.
Thank you! I couldn’t resist ending with that question, because I also liked how it took the poem full circle — because the first line was from a poem about birth.
I love how this works! The way you’ve arranged the lines creates a quirky coherence, and the slant rhymes tighten the joins. Fun to read!
I didn’t notice the slant rhymes before, but of course, now I see (and hear) them. I did grab each line based on the one before, so maybe I had more of a structure in mind than I thought. I think you’ve done this before … pointing out sounds that I hadn’t noticed.
Who was it who said, “When the poem does more than it was intended to, you know the poet has been listening”?