A retrosynthetic comparing /
Of structures and moments unsparing; /
Many verses will run /
Through this narrative, spun: /
Long years and an authorship sharing.
This week’s post examines multiple poems that have collectively played a major role in the past few decades for me. In honor of my 300th post here, which is extremely tough to believe, it looks back over decades in doing so (“retrosynthetic comparing”), and it tells a story that is meaningful for me (a “narrative, spun”). It includes a poem of my own at the end, but it first discusses verses from far more lyrical writers (“an authorship sharing”).
***
When I think of family members I miss dearly, I often note that describing them or their work gets more comically impressive with each passing phrase. To wit, my uncle was a renowned lawyer who attended law school after retiring from a near-professional baseball career, for which his name is enshrined in multiple athletic halls of fame.
When my uncle unexpectedly passed away in a car wreck, my mother wrote a tribute for her brother, for the memorial booklet. She did so within two days of the accident, via a pitch-perfect homage to A.E. Housman, because her parents preferred not to use any of the available texts.
(And she did so fully anonymously. One of the few brighter memories I have from that weekend is in finally realizing what had happened, given the verse’s telltale lack of attribution. “Mom, did YOU write this? When was there any time?!” I bewilderedly inquired at the visitation. “It is beautiful.”)
Mom’s poem read as follows:
“Not old, not young; in life’s full stride /
He entered the eternal tide, /
And kinsman of a stiller town /
He lays life’s common burdens down.
Still a victor, head held high, /
Both garlands and regrets laid by, /
In heaven’s ranks, he takes his place, /
Interrupted in the race.”
Again, this was patterned after Housman’s famous 1896 poem “To An Athlete Dying Young,” a few stanzas of which follow and which can be read in its entirety here.
“The time you won your town the race /
We chaired you through the market-place; /
Man and boy stood cheering by, /
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come, /
Shoulder-high we bring you home, /
And set you at your threshold down, /
Townsman of a stiller town…”
***
Mom also passed away far too early, around this time of year. Summer is always challenging; writing is therapeutic, but July is a tough stretch of time to examine purely in prose. Likely unsurprisingly, given this website’s format, I often find that poetry has the lower activation barrier in terms of getting something on the page. That has been true again this year. I landed on the following lines recently, thinking about how echoes of Mom’s final day arise each summer.
The moments, last: a memory vast; /
Heartbreaking gravitation. /
The room was still; my mind worked, shrill /
In panic-preservation.
Years’ spiral path, an aftermath; /
The summer: waiting, ever. /
Bring dizzied sketch through decade stretch. /
Find place to stand. Reach lever, /
Alchemic rhyme of thought and time. /
Remembrance brings new shape–
Persistent sense of present tense, /
Of running through the tape.
This poem is far from precise in terms of the concepts it references, but it’s been helpful to write down. The immense mental “gravitation” of that day means I return to it when each year cycles back to July. Moreover, I’ve thought often this year about the concept of conservation of energy: what the loss of so much metaphoric potential would mean for the corresponding amount of kinetic energy, since the latter is a function in part of velocity. I will reiterate: this poem takes many science-jargon liberties and borrows from several mismatched concepts. However, its narrative shift reframes my perspective and acknowledges that Mom gave every effort her all over her final months, fully present until the end (“running through the tape”). Whatever the concrete observations of one day, that is the far truer conclusion.
***
This 2026 poem takes the structure of a ballad: it uses iambic meter (da-DUM; e.g., “to-DAY”), and it alternates tetrameter and trimeter (lines of four and three iambic feet, respectively). As often happens when I write reflectively, I find the internal rhymes within the tetrametric lines to be constructive in building an overall structure.
Interestingly, I had not initially thought of the other poems from this post; I associated those primarily with my uncle’s wintertime memorial, until this year. However, I returned to them after writing the 2026 verse, given the imagery of its last lines. I hadn’t realized this before, but both Housman’s and Mom’s verses essentially follow half of the ballad structure: only the lines of iambic tetrameter, rather than alternating with iambic trimeter. That sense of fragmentation relative to the true ballad (a poetic form often used to tell a complete, heroic story) seems particularly fitting, given the two poems’ elegiac nature. That is a connection I had not yet made, and I doubt it would have arisen without my own iterative routine, as imperfect as it is. The image continually coming to mind has been a relay race: repeated laps around the same track, but progress overall. Circling back to find something new has been meaningful.
Mom was a gifted writer and English professor who achieved a full-time career in academia while balancing the eccentric demands of parsonage life, which involved multiple moves to various small towns, at random times, for decades. I appreciate this summer’s opportunity to return to her creative work and still learn more, to find it newly resonant. Going in circles is a little easier to take when there’s any impression, anywhere, of passing a baton.
Chemphasis 